fons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 12:18:57AM +0200, Robin Gareus wrote:
On 05/31/2010 10:42 PM, fons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
If an audio subsystem is using 320MB of memory it's broken. Just dump it.
I think you followed Lennart's presentation @LAC2010 [1] explaining the
motivation for this: Pulseaudio keeps buffers sometimes 10 secs long or
even more. The reason for that is to have the CPU wake up as little as
possible in order to save power.
This is a bogus argument.
Keeping software buffers does not help to reduce the number of
times the CPU has to wake up - this depends *only* on how much
the audio *hardware* is able to buffer. For this reason chips
designed for portable use have something like 2 seconds of
internal buffering.
320 MB corresponds to more than ** 13 minutes ** of stereo signal
in floating point format at 48 kHz.
The first recording studio I helped assemble was a reasonably funded student
radio studios, it was fully analogue, 8-track, good mics .. at the time digital
was beginning to be available, but way beyond our means. It was possible to buy
a digital delay of maybe 10 seconds - I think they were mostly used as a buffer
on the main feed of talkback radio, or as part of very expensive effects units -
but it would have cost as much as the rest of the studio put together, which had
some reasonable gear, and substantially more than a modest sized home in the
cheapish inner suburb we were in.
Simon
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