It could have been so nice, but Ardour freezes ...again [Solved]

#1

Good day one and all, it’s me again, rather annoyed and upset because Ardour freezes every 20 minutes since the last two hours. Before I continued working on the mix of the current project (which is still “almost” finished) this afternoon I tried my new bass guitar on a track of the latter, and I noticed spontaneous high DSP percentages every ten minutes or so, which were audible as glitches. I wasn’t recording, just had the respective track set to Input.

It is Ardour 8.12 on Debian 11, installed on a Lenovo S10 ThinkStation with a dual core CPU and 8GB RAM. I set the CPU frequency to constant maximum after I had noticed the issue with the high DSP level.

Last time I postet, it happened when I was in the Editor, applying a lot of volume gain and processor (all ACE) automation, and I thought it was due to the inferior video card, but now it also happens within the Mixer.

When the DAW freezes the cursor does, too, and I have to open a virtual terminal (black screen, white characters) and log in to see TOP, which shows the Ardour GUI using 195% CPU (as I said, it’s dual core and the system apparently counts 100% each), apply the kill prompt and restart Ardour.

What tha heck is goin’ on, would anybody be so kind as to make a suggestion where to look to remedy this? I’d be most obliged.

Slightly depressed, so no “A-hooga” this time
Frank

#2

I am sorry to hear that. Does the session still load?

What is the memory use?
I could imagine that perhaps Ardour locks all available RAM and then the system starts a swap-storm. It’s unlikely that Ardour needs 8GB, but if you use some synths perhaps that is the issue?

#3

Can your laptop cool the CPU with it locked to maximum clock frequency?
Monitor the temperature and see if it hits maximum allowed, that will cause the CPU to trigger thermal throttling.
If the CPU temperature does not stay constant at a value with reasonable margin below maximum, it will be better to set the CPU frequency to constant but lower than maximum.

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#4

I wouldn’t exactly call the S10 a laptop… I have installed a temperature monitoring software and will report tomorrw when I’m on the session again. For now, I’ll call it a day.

I wrote “Constant maximum” but I may not have used the correct expression there. The cpufreq-set package distinguishes between three governors: on-demand, conservative, and performance, the latter keeping the frequency constantly between 2,0 and 2,3 GHz, whereas 2,3 is maximum.

Should I choose “conservative”, which is also contant but at a lower frequency of appr. 1,9 GHz?

However, the DSP issue already occured before I set the performance governor.

Thanks,
Frank

#5

Hey Robin,

the session loads without problems and recovers data from crash like it’s supposed to.

No synths at all, just guitars, vocals, and drums, but 27 tracks and heavy automation.

I didn’t pay attention to the memory use but I believe it wasn’t too high. I’ll have a look tomorrow.

As long as Ardour works, TOP reads 75% CPU use by the Ardour GUI and about 65% by Xorg, plus various smaller processes, naturally.

When Ardour freezes, it consumes all or nearly all of the CPU capacity.

Thanks, Frank

#6

Are you using Wayland or Xorg ? I would definitely try Xorg if you are not currently using it. Wayland caused multiple random crashes on my system. Xorg is very stable.

#7

My above reply to Robin Gareus already said it, I’m using Xorg, which I believe is the default screen server for Debian.

#8

Sorry, I saw Lenovo Think… and confused a ThinkStation with a ThinkPad.
Thermal throttling is not likely to be a problem with a ThinkStation case.

Yeah, that might cause glitches in the audio but should not cause Ardour to freeze. Something else is likely happening.

No, for realtime use you want to use a governor which does not switch the clock speed. Performance is fine, but it may make the fans run faster (and therefor louder) than necessary. The “userspace” governor allows you to specify a specific clock frequency (from the list of allowed settings, not arbitrary) so that you can keep the clock speed from changing, but set it to a more power friendly setting just enough for your workload.

From ardour.org, or from the Debian repository?

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#9

I myself was forced to make my laptop run the fan at top speed 24/7 to help resolve the ‘freeze’. It didn’t fully fix it, but it helped a little. That, and making sure to sleep it whenever I am not using it.

Though, I think it would be prudent for DAW developers to realize that we aren’t just using their DAW, but plugins, other hosts, and if you play an instrument that needs a preamp rig, there’s that too. I have to have hydrogen and guitarix open at the very least. So my choice was to pre-record the hydrogen track as audio because midi then would require a drum machine and that would just make a new problem.

I am in the midst of delegating some of that to my main machine which is 16x better than my DAW machine. Its just that main machine doesn’t have pipewire so the jack support isnt as good. If only they had supported old nvidia drivers in 22.04+ ;o;

That said, had far too many issues with my Lenovo laptop, i ended up switching to this toshiba one i have now.

#10

I rather think that the plugins are the main problem and not Ardour itself. Ardour consumes very, very few resources.

#12

Thank you everyone for your time and your suggestions, I’ve got news:

It looks like two faulty electrolytic capacitors on the graphics card were the reason for the freeze.

After some of you pointed to a cooling problem, I opened up the computer yesterday morning to vacuum it, which was long overdue anyway, and when I pulled out the graphics card, I immediately saw the damage:

Two electrolytic capacitors suffering from ‘capacitor plague’. If you’re not familiar with the term, ask your search engine. Some things are just unbelievable…

Just for confirmation I took my Q Branch Ohming Device and measured the ESRs, which were more than 2 Ohms, so much for that.

A new graphics card is currently out of the question financially, so I had to take action and repair it, which I prefer anyway.

And now try to find an actual shop in our online shop world where you can walk in and buy two
1500uF / 6.3V electrolytic capacitors, 10V would be fine, too, to take home and solder in right away so that you can IMMEDIATELY continue mixing your effing song, work on which already feels like it’s taken years. It’s enough to make you tear your hair out!

Eventually I found a shop like that in Cologne and I drove there this morning, even though it’s a 60 km one-way trip.

The computer started up ok with the repaired card and I worked on the Mix for one hour straight without freeze. I would assume that if it works for one hour it will do so for 1000 hours…

TOP still reads 75% CPU usage by the Ardour GUI and 65% by Xorg.
Memory use by Ardour is 10%, and 1,4% by Xorg.
Ardour DSP between 32 and 58% during playback.

I have no comparison, so if anyone of you finds that these are unusual high numbers I assume they’re the result of the system failing to load the Nouveau firmware, according to DMESG. If the NVidia Quadro FX 1700 graphics card was able to its job properly, with the driver working like it’s supposed to, there would not be so much CPU usage by the GUI, am I right?

If anyone has a suggestion how to remedy that I’d be most obliged.

If the computer keeps working without freezing again for the next few days, I’ll flag the thread as solved.

Thanx again everyone, have a nice evening.

A-hooga!

Frank

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#13

That is great news, and even better that you were able to repair it yourself!

As for CPU and DSP usage, that depends on the actual hardware. I’m however surprised that the GUI needs that much CPU. Do you play at large zoom with follow-playhead, or use stationary playhead?

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#14

Thanks for the advice on the CPU frequency, I followed suit and set both CPUs to 2000MHz.
After that, cpufreq-info says current CPU frequency is 1,99 GHz, while the maximum would be 2,3GHz.
I think that’ s good enough, wouldn’t you agree?

I’m running Ardour 8.12 from Ardour.org, Debian 11 only comes with Ardour 6(!), which became an issue at some point:

https://discourse.ardour.org/t/ardour-6-on-debian-11-crashes-after-years-of-flawless-working-order/111366/40

#15

No, I usually zoom out to max, but since you mentioned it I looked it up and noticed that “follow playhead” is checked. Does this mode consume that much CPU resource? I’ll switch to stationary playhead then if it’s more modest. I never knew, I started with pretty much everything set to default three years ago and carried on like that ever since…

But like I said, I suspect that the nouveau driver isn’t working properly. I reinstalled the package and its dependencies today to no avail. Here’s a quote from dmesg after the reinstallation:

[ 76.618880] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nv84_xuc00f (-2)
[ 76.618885] firmware_class: See Firmware - Debian Wiki for information about missing firmware
[ 76.618888] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nv84_xuc00f failed with error -2
[ 76.618894] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: vp: unable to load firmware nouveau/nv84_xuc00f
[ 76.618897] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: vp: init failed, -2
[ 76.618951] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nv84_xuc103 (-2)
[ 76.618954] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nv84_xuc103 failed with error -2
[ 76.618956] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bsp: unable to load firmware nouveau/nv84_xuc103
[ 76.618958] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bsp: init failed, -2
[ 88.763264] rfkill: input handler disabled
[ 110.431480] rfkill: input handler enabled
[ 111.751109] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nv84_xuc00f (-2)
[ 111.751117] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nv84_xuc00f failed with error -2
[ 111.751121] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: vp: unable to load firmware nouveau/nv84_xuc00f
[ 111.751123] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: vp: init failed, -2
[ 111.751151] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nv84_xuc103 (-2)
[ 111.751153] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nv84_xuc103 failed with error -2
[ 111.751156] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bsp: unable to load firmware nouveau/nv84_xuc103
[ 111.751158] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bsp: init failed, -2

I’ll consult the Debian users mailing list about the issue.

I WOULD install the proprietary driver if it wasn’t strongly recommended by Debian NOT to do that for my graphics card because it is quite outdated and the old driver represents a security issue. Oh well…

#16

One last word about the nouveau driver and nonfree firmware: The required Debian packages are all installed, I even reinstalled the firmware-misc-nonfree Package and restarted the computer, but DMESG keeps complaining. Next stop: Debian users mailing list.

#17

Switching to stationary playhead has the effect that the CPU usage by the Ardour GUI exceeds 80% while with follow-playhead it remains well in the 70s.

And now I’ll call it a day, Good Night everybody.

#18

The opposite. Stationary playhead requires move CPU/GPU since the whole canvas moves.
Follow playhead only when the playhead moves to the next page. If the whole session is shown (zoom out) CPU/GPU usage should be minimal.

Here with Intel graphics (Thinkpad X1), I rarely have more than 5% total CPU usage for Xorg, and almost all Ardour’s CPU usage is for plugins/DSP.

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#19

Thanks for the enlightenment.

Depending on year of manufacture, your X1 may not be cutting edge technology by today’s standards but it’s still a fairly modern machine, I trust the graphics live up to one’s expectations. Wait and see until I sorted out the mess with nouveau on my distro.

For the time being, thanks again and all the Best.

…and now back to work, Rock’n’Roll !!!

#20

So… when I consulted the Debian Wiki and the Lenovo Archive I learnt that the Lenovo ThinkStation S10 is quite picky when it comes to graphics cards.

The one that my machine is equipped with is only supported by the NVidia legacy driver 390.xx, and only up to Debian 10 “Buster”, so much for that.

There’s a slight chance that ONE NVidia graphics card might run with the approprate driver. You can get it used from 10 to 20€, so I’ll try that, and if it doesn’t work I’m gonna need a bigger boat…!

But the good news is that Ardour keeps working without any further freezes, so I’ll consider this solved.

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#21

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