Thanks for the reply, Mark. I ran Benno's disk latency tests quite a bit when I was setting up my system. As far as I could tell, the test just checks playback, not record. As I mentioned, I have no trouble playing back (in either Duplex or Playback modes) to either disk system. When I was fussing with the early 2.6 kernels, performance with these tests was always worse than with 2.4.23. With the 2.4.23 kernel, tests on the IDE/ATA drive were consistently < 3ms, whereas there were usually a couple >3ms blips with the SCSI Raid0 with the diskwrite and diskcopy stress tests (all other tests were <3ms). When I turned on the write cache on the SCSI drives, the results were like the IDE/ATA, but I got just as many xruns with jackd and ardour. This was one of the observations that made me wonder whether the problem was actually the SCSI controller (i.e., nothing I did to the SCSI system affected the number of xruns). I haven't tried those latency tests with the 2.6.9 that I have now, primarily because they didn't match up with the "real world" performance that I am concerned with (multitrack recording). This is why I'm hoping the ecasound tests will tell me something. As for desktop, I'm using openbox - I got fewer xruns with it than with gnome. Never tried KDE, but posts to this list (including yours!) don't encourage me to. Joel > It's been quite a while since I've heard of anyone using it, but what > about running Benno's disk latency testing program on your raid drives > and see what happens? > > Or does that no longer work with 2.6 kernels? > > When I worked with the tool it gave me very reasonable numbers vs. > what I was seeing for xruns. > > Also, I don't think I remember you mentioning what desktop environment > you are using, but even with my 2.6.9-rc2-mm4 type kernel I got lots > of xruns under KDE, while Gnome was much better and fluxbox was, for > me, the best. (measurably...)
