Rob, The basic setup of the machine looks pretty good to me. If your eventual intention is to record audio, then you may want to consider a second hard drive later, but I think that has nothing to do with this problem. If I understand your setup, then you have no 'planned' disk activity when you are running this test? (Other than the writing of your log file?) What happens to xruns if you start some activity in another terminal? Say large file copies, or playing a CD? What happens when you run with -p 256 or -p 512? Is it OK? Running with latencies this low with a SB16 might just be beyond its capabilities. I got xruns on my 500MHz P3 running at less than 256 using an Audiophile 2496, but I can run my Athlon XP 2600+ at 64 with my RME cards, so ther are limits to wht these cards can do. Mark On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 04:28, rob fell wrote: > Hello all > > I'm trying to get a gentoo based audio box (primarily Ardour) off the ground. Despite my best efforts, > I can't eliminate xruns to a level I could live with (10ms+ xruns every 2 minutes on average seems > excessive - esp. with stereo @ 44k1). There's some captured data at the very end of this mail. > > My observations are made using; > jackd -v -R -d... -r 44100 -p 128 2>&1 | tee jacklog (i.e. stereo SB16 @44k1) > and ardour, session open but not actively playing > > I'll present my questions before wandering off into a tedious list (apologies for length) of stuff I've > already done. Would anyone care to offer an opinion on these questions; > > 1. Am I expecting too much? Either from my hardware, or the current state of Linux. > 2. Is there a vital piece of config that I've totally overlooked? > 3. Is there a better way to measure this to home in on the source of the problem? > 4. Are the xruns incidental to the disk activity - is this all a symptom of something else? > 5. Insert any other question I should be asking here. > > Thanks in advance for any help/advice offered, I've run out of ideas. > > Ta > R >