Recording stops "Your machine can't keep up"

[guysherman]

Hi All,

I've been recording some ambient modular synth stuff, so I've just been letting it run. I'm running Mixbus 32C 6.1, and I get this error message, usually at ~6 minutes of tracking, "Recording has stopped because your machine can't keep up".

I asked on the ardour IRC group, and they said disk speed. So I defragged (who knew that that was even a thing on ext4!), and benchmarked (I get about 500MB/s writes, should be fast enough for 2 tracks!).

Anyway, I did another experiment and tried the same thing with Ardour 6.2. No issues.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Guy.

[madmaxmiller]

Hi All,

I've been recording some ambient modular synth stuff, so I've just been letting it run. I'm running Mixbus 32C 6.1, and I get this error message, usually at ~6 minutes of tracking, "Recording has stopped because your machine can't keep up".

I asked on the ardour IRC group, and they said disk speed. So I defragged (who knew that that was even a thing on ext4!), and benchmarked (I get about 500MB/s writes, should be fast enough for 2 tracks!).

Anyway, I did another experiment and tried the same thing with Ardour 6.2. No issues.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Guy.

Are you using VCV Rack? That eats heaps of power. MB32C needs some, too. I guess you don't have latency issues while doing this, so set the buffers as high as you can... and maybe get an SSD only for sessions soon. My session-SSD is mounted under /home/LOCALDATA

MMM

[markofthewild]

what distro are you using? I had that issue at times until i went to a low latency kernal

[guysherman]

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04, with a low-latency linux 5.8 kernel.

The reason I looked into the disk speed issue was because Paul, the creator of Ardour (on which Mixbus is based) said that error is usually a disk issue.

That said I will have a play with latency etc, as all the extra dsp that mixbus does could be a problem. Not getting any xruns though.

Thanks for the help team.

[PBuryk]

@guysherman -

Some more info might be helpful...

What kind of disk is it? Make/Model ?
How is it connected? Via USB?
Does this happen at the same time, every time?

Cheers!
Patrick

[markofthewild]

Also i have this issue when using mixbus as the monitor instead of the hardware....it seems that my system was unable to keep up recording and playback at the same time, especially when taxing the system.

[Dingo]

@guysherman - is your project on a drive that is not your system drive ?

[condecarlos]

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04, with a low-latency linux 5.8 kernel.

If you are on the main Ubuntu distro you need to tweak the system more than installing low-latency kernel. For instance, changing swappiness to a low value, setting governor to performance, increasing the maximum watches on files and so on...

If you had not done that, check this article on the Arch Linux wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio

Cheers
Carlos.

[guysherman]

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04, with a low-latency linux 5.8 kernel.

If you are on the main Ubuntu distro you need to tweak the system more than installing low-latency kernel. For instance, changing swappiness to a low value, setting governor to performance, increasing the maximum watches on files and so on...

If you had not done that, check this article on the Arch Linux wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio

Cheers
Carlos.

Thanks I'll take a look at that.

Some others in the thread asked a few questions about the disk. My disks are set up using LVM. I have two 255GB SSDs, and a 1TB SSD. The first disk (a crucial, 255GB) has boot, swap and / on it, the second disk (intel 255GB SSD) has /var and some of /home on it, and the final disk (1TB crucial SSD) has the rest of /home on it.

my sessions live under /home/guy/Music/

PHP Code:

sda                     8:0    0 223.6G  0 disk 
├─sda1                  8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2                  8:2    0 223.1G  0 part 
  ├─ubuntu--vg-root   253:0    0 222.1G  0 lvm  /
  ├─ubuntu--vg-swap_1 253:1    0   976M  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  └─ubuntu--vg-home   253:3    0     1T  0 lvm  /home
sdb                     8:16   0 223.6G  0 disk 
├─ubuntu--vg-var      253:2    0   100G  0 lvm  /var
└─ubuntu--vg-home     253:3    0     1T  0 lvm  /home
sdc                     8:32   0 931.5G  0 disk 
└─ubuntu--vg-home     253:3    0     1T  0 lvm  /home 


The issue doesn't happen at exactly the same time, but it is typically between 5 and 6 minutes.

[PBuryk]

@GuySherman -

I don't see a need to concatenate your disk pool via LVM. I also wonder if that might be
contributory to your issue - different disks w/ different performance.

But, regardless if that is true in your case or not, I would set up those disks as follows:

- 255 GB SSD as your system/SWAP disk. If you want to allocate 8/16 GB for SWAP,
go ahead and do so. Depending on the amount of memory you have you should not
need a lot of SWAP space to begin with, but it is always recommended to have enough
SWAP space to cover your RAM memory pool, in case of a catastrophic memory dump.
This should be done using two partitions only - one for SWAP and the rest for everything else.
So... Install everything for your OS and apps you want to run, on this disk.

- 255 GB SSD for your DAW projects. Allocate all space to one partition - EXT4 type.
Keep space here managed; only recent or ongoing work should reside here.

- 1TB SSD for an overall archive. Allocate all space to one partition - EXT4 type.
Make backups of your DAW projects there. Keep previous versions of your apps
there in case you need to re-install them for some reason in the future.

My Linux DAWs are setup similarly, although they are all 7500 RPM HDDs, and I've
never experienced a throughput issue with them.

Hope this helps!

Patrick