RealtimeKit and the audio problem [LWN.net]

RealtimeKit and the audio problem

Posted Jul 1, 2009 23:21 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: RealtimeKit and the audio problem by MisterIO
Parent article: RealtimeKit and the audio problem

Er, well, yes. I'd expect to be able to play back music no matter what
else is going on, as long as the system isn't in single-user mode or
something emergency-maintenancy like that. I'm not going to stop listening
to something just because I've got something that happens to be
heavyweight going on at the same time --- unless, that is, it starts to
skip or the machine starts thrashing or something like that.

(Just now I was doing a foreground compilation, a git gc --aggressive of a
500Mb repository, a fairly large 'git grep's, while a background tinderbox
chewed away on the same machine... oh, and the music was coming over NFS,
just to add insult to injury.

There were no skips, but this *is* a quad-core Nehalem with 24Gb RAM so I
suppose skipping would be rather unlikely.)

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RealtimeKit and the audio problem

Posted Jul 2, 2009 10:20 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

Surely the music coming over NFS actually makes it *less* likely to skip, since it doesn't have to contend for disk access?

(For my part I only ever get audio skips when my system is swapping like a mad thing. I was under the impression from the rest of this thread that *playback* is a non-issue.)

RealtimeKit and the audio problem

Posted Jul 2, 2009 11:23 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The tinderboxing was also coming over NFS from the same machine.

But I'd be astounded if the machine it was coming from had any problems
with disk I/O (similarly oversupplied with RAM and with half a gig of
cache on its RAID card: music does not need 250Mb/s of disk bandwidth!
Hell, at the quality I listen at, it doesn't need 250Mb/hr...)

And yes, it does seem that recording is the problem area, as so often when
the real world with its harsh latency bounds gets involved.