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SubjectRe: sound & hdd = the usual lowlatency problems
> > I'm noticing this one one of my machines.  When writing to a hard drive, the
> > sound drags. The machine I'm on has piix4 ide and an isa scsi card. I'm
^^^^^

> > playing sounds from the drive on the scsi card (aha1510 I think is the scsi
> > card). I tried writing to both an ide and scsi drive, both drag the sound.
> > Sound card is an SB16 pnp /w ide port (not disablable unfortunately). I had
> > a similar problem on an isa ide card playing sounds off of the hard drive
> > (like 44k 16bit 2ch sound off the drive, sound card was an ess card). My
> > home box that this is happneing on is 2.2.7. The one with the isa ide is no
> > longer active, but it was running 2.0.36.
>
> Your problem is very likely not hardware related.
> The problem lies in the kernel which,while the disk is under stress, does not
> run your sound-app for a time which is bigger than your audio buffer,
> and therefore the sound skips.

Why does everyone insist on it's skipping?!?! It's dragging. Remember
8track tapes?!?!

I'm sure it's hardware related because that machine has never done this when
it was primary. Not with scsi or ide. I used to run a 540mb wdc (which now
has a 420mb wdc) and it never once dragged due to writing or reading.

It would however drag when network activity went pretty high, it was a
conflict between the nic and the usb (which can't be disabled).

> (There is a little possibilty that the problems are hardware related but
> this happens only with broken hardware which monopolizes the
> bus for too long time , like some old matrox GFX cards, or some old
> IDE controllers, but PII class machines should be safe in this respect)
>
> Ingo Molnar found the weak spots in the kernel , and with his patches, he
> demonstrated that Linux is able to provide very low scheduling latencies
> ( = goodbye audio skips :-) ) on a PII class machine +EIDE disks, even under
> the highest load.
>
> We can only hope that these enhancements get into mainstream kernel before 2.4.
> Just because this enhancement opens up Linux to a new, big class of
> realtime-audio/video apps.

There's nothing wrong with the hardware itself. When it ran 2.0.3x I never
had a problem except when there was network activity. The problem went away
when I got a PCI sound card. I kept the old sb16 for other things (lots of
programs didn't like the es1370 driver and the sb16 worked just fine). The
16 would drag, but not the pci card. Now, the machine was upgraded and the
old parts upgraded another machine. I threw a sb card in it so that I could
play deathmatch games between me and friends with sound.

But the bottom line is, it's not skipping period. It drags just like the
old 8tracks. When the machine gets taken down (which may not be for a long
time, it's on a ups and I don't reboot machines unless I do upgrades, this
is a nonissue for the machine)

--
Lab tests show that use of micro$oft causes cancer in lab animals

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