On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 11:45 PM, James Cameron <quozl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Yes, the ideal is that the tracks being played are cached in RAM so that > no disk access is required. The recording track would be creating a > file that would be periodically written to disk. this is not the ideal. its how any serious recording application has to work. Linux filesystems can stall a thread for seconds while doing disk i/o. you cannot do disk i/o from the thread that handles incoming audio unless you already buffered like crazy. ardour has a buffer of about 5 seconds, per channel, per direction (its user configurable). both playback and recording occurs via these buffers. ardour also tries to read/write in blocks of 256kB, since at one point we empirically determined that this maximized disk throughput in many cases. in an ideal world, we'd probably use O_RAW for file i/o, and thus bypass the duplicated buffering of the kernel FS buffer cache. but for now, that extra layer of buffering serves us quite well (especially for read-ahead), and so we don't bother with that. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
