Things that cause xruns

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English Guy
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Things that cause xruns

Post by English Guy »

I was recently helping a friend who has an older machine and having problems with xruns.

I turned off his networking ( which I knew about) but also found that when ardour saves it caused an xrun, which was a new one, so I disabled autosave. These fixed the problem.

I am interested if people have found anything else that can cause xruns, having found one new to me. This thread could also end up as a useful checklist.
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magicalex
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Re: Things that cause xruns

Post by magicalex »

Rather than disabling networking (which can be a bit inconvenient), I've found that disabling NetworkManager's periodic scanning for networks with

Code: Select all

sudo killall -STOP NetworkManager
is just as effective.
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Re: Things that cause xruns

Post by briandc »

I'd say, just about anything that takes up any priority CPU. Personally, I just kind of "feel out" which apps I can run and which I prefer not to. Things like an oscilloscope (even a synth's own oscilloscope) can cause a lot of disturbance.


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Re: Things that cause xruns

Post by briandc »

The Audacity Wiki has a few good suggestions too: Recording

Hth!

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Re: Things that cause xruns

Post by chaocrator »

never had any troubles with ethernet networking.
only wifi, which is the official champion.

and just my 8½ cents.
in general, modern desktop-oriented distros are not good for realtime audio. by default they have too much obscure things running in the background.
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Re: Things that cause xruns

Post by Frank Carvalho »

I have had issues with ACPI and power management interrupts too, causing xruns. It can be a bit of trial and error to figure out what causes it.

/Frank
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Re: Things that cause xruns

Post by gimmeapill »

Regarding the networking: If you want something faster (by faster I mean faster as a client to connect to a wired or wireless network via dhcp and lighter on system resources), try Intel's Connman: https://01.org/connman
There's also a nice GUI called CMST: https://github.com/andrew-bibb/cmst

Unfortunately Network Manager seems to be a hard dependency for most desktop environments, so your mileage may vary, but I'd speculate it is still a dog performance wise (it used to be perfectly horrible, although things seems to have improved a bit).

At least with Connman, I don't remember having to turn wifi off because of xruns in recent history...
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Re: Things that cause xruns

Post by folderol »

On my DAW I'm running debian testing with no 'live' network monitoring at all. I never use it for browsing other other 'social' operations, and if I actually want to do an upgrade (very rare) it's no real hassle to plug in the network and do a reboot.
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