And also on computers generally lol.

The situation: I’m trying out Bitwig on my geriatric computer, which is running Linux Mint. It seems that I can’t do very much without spiking the DSP, leading to awful glitchiness in playback. However, according to btop, the CPU (i7 4770) load isn’t breaking 30%, spread evenly across the cores.

Things I have tried:

  • uninstalling speech dispatcher, which helped
  • tweaking the pipewire config, which doesn’t seem to have helped much

So… what is the bottleneck here?

EDIT: the (main) issue was that my user didn’t have real time priority permissions. An edit to /etc/security/limits.conf has improved things immeasurably.

    • Andrzej3K [none/use name]OP
      3•5 days ago

      I’m using Bitwig (the DAW) wrt hardware, it’s an i7 4770 with 8gb DDR3 RAM (which doesn’t seem to be filling up) and a sata SSD.

  • nanook
    2•5 days ago

    One of the things you run into with audio production software is that in order to maintain accuracy with respect to phasing between channels, they require very accurate timing, this usually comes at the expense of very high interrupt rates and context switching and under the best of circumstances this is hardware intensive, more so with older processors that don’t have single instructions for storing the entire register set or restoring the entire register set to the stack with one instruction as many modern CPUs do. So hate to say it but you may need to upgrade to something less geriatric. You might also try a real-time kernel, it might allow the application to keep things sync’d up with less hardware interrupts though it will rely more on software interrupts do do the same. Unfortunately, I have found that while I can get the performance I require on my six year old processor using a realtime kernel, it has come with a sacrifice of stability, that is to say real time on my hardware at least has not been terribly stable.