Firstly, thanks for everyone’s work in developing Ardour. A few comments about the latest beta version:
While giving Ardour2, beta 10, a test drive, and successfully making three half-hour recordings—with a few glitches, I had only a few problems with the recording stopping and error messages being displayed telling me that the disk system couldn’t keep up with Ardour.
With the previous version of Ardour, I couldn’t record for more than a few seconds, so there’s been a definite improvement. However, with 0.99.3, I didn’t have to restart the recording several times, as a result of error messages about disk system performance, in order to get a half-hour’s worth of recording.
Furthermore, with 0.99.3 I could also play the recording back and copy parts of it to other tracks with no problems regarding disk system speed. With Ardour 2 beta 10, I can’t even play the recording back for more than a few seconds.
My disk subsystem may not be blazing fast, but surely it’s not excessively slow (is it?) since hdparm shows the following:
epona:/home/rdd# hdparm -Tt /dev/hdc
/dev/hdc:
Timing cached reads: 516 MB in 2.00 seconds = 257.98 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 60 MB in 3.07 seconds = 19.56 MB/sec
Should that be too slow?
Note: hdc is also the system disk, so perhaps there’s a problem with swapping; I have about 192MB or RAM installed and the system’s processor speed is 800MHz.
When using /dev/hdd, not in used with any other processes, there were similar results for hdparm, for recording with version beta 9; I still encountered problems with ardour telling me that the disk couldn’t keep up.
Thanks for any help that anyone can kindly provide with this.