Hi Alex > i see that both your mouse (?!) and your network card seem to have > higher priority than your IDE channels (harddisks). > i would advice you to try without the network card and not to move > your mouse =) believe it or not i did try an "ifconfig eth0 down" to see if it would improve the situation! (i did say i was getting desperate). > and what Mark Knecht said about period size for the SB soundcards is > also slightly touched here: http://www.djcj.org/LAU/jack/ > your 128 setting might be too small. did you try with 256 or 512? looks like no-one is using anything as cruddy as a SB128 PCI anymore (and with good reason). when Mark suggested that the card might not be man-enough for the job i realised that my internal model of how a soundcard works might be a little naive - i suspect it has more than a lump of DP ram and some counters :) i set the buffersize smaller to try to act as a crude filter to make my awk script simpler - though this neglects the effect on the card itself of running at a higher rate. the most success so far with the testing seems to be at 1024 - though large file copies causes massive xruns at any rate (BTW: how large would a 'large' file be?). i can't decide whether to gamble on the purchase of a decent card and hope this all goes away, or whether to read the alsa driver code for the card to see if i can work out just how bad the card really is :( > > and ofcourse... good luck. looks like i may need it - and some more spare time. thanks. R
