Ardour 3 unusably sluggish

I’ve been running Ardour 2 for years on the same system with no problems. Rock solid, GUI works fine, processing works fine. I don’t really even think about it, it just works.

I just purchased and installed Ardour 3 and it is unusable. GUI is sluggish, processing load is over 50% for half a dozen tracks, maybe five or six EQ’s (the LADSPA triple band parametric with shelves) and a handful of the SC4 compressors running.

Is Ardour 3 significantly more hardware resource intensive than 2? I’m running JACK from QJackCtl with all the same settings and the difference is huge.

Running Ubuntu 12.04, AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 1 gig RAM, Delta 1010 interface.

No, but there is an issue with certain graphics drivers, make sure you are on the most up to date drivers. Also check and see if disabling gradients for waveforms makes a difference.

  Seablade

1 gig of RAM seems small by current standards. It’s reasonable to suppose that A3 has somewhat higher memory requirements than A2 (I haven’t measured), and that this has pushed your system over the edge into the “poor performance” ditch. You might try switching to a low-resource window manager, if you haven’t already done so.

definatly upgrade your ram, i had a ram module go on me which ltook me from 3gb to 1gb, just using ubuntu was horrible with 1gb of ram, i couldnt do anything more than having 1 program open at a time.

I definatly recomend upgrading to atleast 2gb, id go for 4gb as a min these days.

Also i have noticed that ardour 3 seems to use more processing power than ardour 2, even when not playing, however despite that mass amounts of x runs i get it doesnt cause any problems so far (im not sure why im getting so many x runs even after changing my settings so my latency is 40ms)

One thing to be aware of is that the current binary builds you get from ardour.org are compiled with debugging information and without optimization. After another few releases, I will switch to all optimized builds. This doesn’t make a HUGE difference but it will have some impact.

This doesn't make a HUGE difference but it will have some impact.
Having tried optimized vs non-optimized builds, it made a huge difference for me (how much of a difference will depend on system specifications too).
just using ubuntu was horrible with 1gb of ram, i couldnt do anything more than having 1 program open at a time.

This is normal… It has nothing to do with how much RAM you have, its called “Unity” :slight_smile:

I’d guess that the optimized build without the debug info will be much smaller, but only a little faster, so in a RAM starved system that’s starting to use VM and swap, it could make a big difference to speed too.

Running fine here in 2GB on AV Linux with LDXE for a low-footprint desktop.
Try Lubuntu instead of regular Ubuntu, or get more RAM.

Maybe also Ubuntu Studio 12.04 is worth a try - for it has Xfce window manager instead of Unity.
I’m using it on a nine year old 266 GHz Pentium 4 with just 1,5 GB RAM, and even Ardour 3 runs.

Michael

The A3 binary seems fine on Ubuntu Studio 12.10 too, which is just as well as the version of Ardour2 they ship is very out of date and does not host plugins correctly (incorrectly linked against the LV2 libraries from what I can tell - Ubuntu Studio devs, do you test your builds? )