Ardour 3 Slow scrolling/GUI response

I have same issue on my laptop with Intel and ATI cards. And on my PC with ATI card. Both systems are using compositing. There was no performance lags in other apps or desktop usage.
I’ve tried different drivers with no luck…

Interesting.
I have great responsiveness (among the best I have had in any application on any platform) with the built in graphics card in a new intel I7 on a Ubuntu 12.04 (kx studio) and on a I7 laptop (Sony VAIO).
The performance of Mixbus (A2) is much worse. I not tried a normal A2, maybe it is better.
I am using ~40 tracks with several hours of recording (live concerts).

Maybe Intel have done a great job on their drivers (and open source).

Ive been told that composting should take load of the cpu but im not so sure. Something to do with the gpu being used rather than CPU.

I leave composting enabled, but i turn all the FX off.

But recently i have switched the LXDE which is much lighter on system resources and get decent performance. It seems recently that nvidia is playing much nicer with my nforce 405 chipset so ive not had to use the nvidia settings. Ardours mixer performance is pretty good now, however my browser is terrible without and with the nvidia settings i had. scrolling performance is back to what it was.

But ardour is fine. even with lots of plugins loaded.

composting?

composting is definitely not an option. I tried to use my pc system as kitchen bin, but then it kinda broke down.

I was trying 2d mode, compositing, lxde instead of kde - no luck. I read somewhere that this is buggy gtk canvas libs… All my apps works fine except Ardour. Scrolling is getting slower with more tracks in a project.

My experience with the latest version of ardour has been very good - admittedly across 2 reasonably powerful machines.

@ veda_sticks - compositing doesn’t really improve 2D performance … it just gives some pretty bells and whistles (transparency e.t.c.) most drivers now offload a reasonable portion of 2d rendering to the GPU…the remaining amount on a modern CPU that really is not a big deal… If there is a problem with the library or the code that draws the image… then that could have a negative impact.

Mixbus has a lot of proprietary DSP built in … e.g. it has EQ compression e.t.c. on every channel and also has it’s own mixing algorithms… So if you have 40 tracks then you are already running a massive number of plugins before you add any of your own (although general impression so far is the included tools are at a very high level)… This does mean it is more resource intensive than Ardour. However my initial uses of Harrison say it’s worth it… (can’t wait till they release an Ardour 3 based version)

For comparison…
I have ardour3 on my studio desktop machine (core i7 3770k with HT turned off at BIOS and overclocked to 4.5 GHZ - so an OC’d 3570k or OC’d 4670k would be equivalent and cheaper but I have my reasons for this CPU choice which are not music related)… however, I’m using an NVIDIA silent card using Nouveau drivers and RT kernel… the thing works beautifully… DSP load is higher than I would like but I run at very low latency, so that’s my compromise…(~4ms e.g. 64p n3 in either 44.1 or 48 or occasionally I run at 96k at p128 n3 )

My general use laptop is an i5 something (around 2.5 GHZ) and I use that for testing builds and configurations before migrating to the studio machine… and that also runs very smoothly just using the HD on the core i5 (HD4000)… I am using a very light Gentoo build with Fluxbox as my WM… (i’ve been using this for years so have a standard set of keyboard shortcuts e.t.c… )…

Im running a fairly old machine, a cheap msi motherboard with onboard nforce 405 geforce 6100 chipset. It runs fairly well even with KDE. 2ghz dual core althlon 64.

Even with 6 audio tracks all with plugins in them (eq, maybe a few with gain, and some with compression) and a few stereo buses with eq and reverb or delay plugins.

Gui performance is good.

I will be upgrading my machine though, to something with a bit more grunt as i do video editing aswell. something like an AMD 6 or 8 core CPU @ 3ghz combined with a decent video card.

What is your DSP load? though i have maxed out the dsp load on my machine with little effect on gui speed.

On the desktop. I don’t think I’ve ever gone past about 60%… But at the lower latency drums start at somewhere between 40 and 50 if I’m running a lot of plugins… But then I simply increase to 128 frames and it runs fine… I use a FireWire audio io with ffado so performance may be better with a pcie or pci card under ALSA.

For the same price the Intel Core I5 4670k or even 4570k will give you better performance for most audio stuff than a 6 or 8 core AMD piledriver.The reason is the way they handle fpu calculation (which is what most of the audio stuff relies on)… The next gen of AMD chips out early next year may be better but if you are buying now, Intel is the better choice… I’m not biased out of my last 3 machines 2 have been AMD.Others may contradict me here but I haven’t seen any teports. The Intels also run a lot cooler so even overclocked you don’t have to have the fans running high (on a decent cooler)…

Don’t bother with an I7 as AFAIK neither jack nor ardour handles hyperthreading properly yet and simply treat a 4 core I7 as a true 8 core cpu which it isn’t… performance seems more stable with HT turned off…

Well it seems that the sluggish gui performance has returned again and i cant figure it out, the tweaks i posted earlier now have no effect.

This isnt an ardour problem though, its a driver or system problem as it also effects webpages with either flash content or javascript.