SSD disks vs. other ways to improve Rack performances on Linux

VCV Rack
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this maybe a silly question but i cant seem to find a defenitive answer: i have a lenovo u430 touch (8g ram, i5-4200U dual-core with intel integrated hd4400 graphics). will sdd hard drive improve my vcvrack experience? cpu-wise? gpu-wise? it’s the only thing i can upgrade in this machine, and i have some patches i cant really run without stuttering. i understand i can reduce the frame rate from 60hz to 30hz or even 20hz in order to stop the stuttering and glitches (and it does work, most of the times). i also enabled real time priority and 4 threads and i think it works.

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sorry, no, it doesn’t work like that

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thanks, i thought so, it wont have an effect besides the loading time of the program ofcourse.

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my most effective workaround is closing any other applications, especially web browsers. also try disabling wifi and disconnecting unneeded devices.

I’m assuming you know about hitting F3, checking how much CPU each module takes, replacing the ‘hungriest’ ones with lighter alternatives if possible.

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thanks, i will try disabling the wi-fi, i wonder if it will have a noticeable effect

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f you’re running Linux you can also try swapping out whatever the default desktop is on your machine (eg, Unity, Gnome, KDE. etc) with a light-weight window manager like fluxbox. I’ve done that it the past to try to eek out every little bit of performance, and it helps. A bit.

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you are correct: i only recently upgraded from ubuntustudio ( real time kernel and xfce desktop) to ubuntu 20.10 (and i have win10). so i can say that with alsa i can do a little bit more than on win10. i only managed to configure jack fairly recently and hadn’t really tried anything big yet. i should. but since i cant upgrade anything in my laptop except to ssd i was wandering if it might help, even just a little bit. i understand that my gpu isn’t that great for vcv but i can’t upgrade it… worth asking anyway :slight_smile:

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If you have an old hd upgrading to an ssd will improve your laptop 100% it’s performance. Maybe not vcv but the overall experience.

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Realtime will not improve your performance, it make the CPU jump between the process at the moment when is needed, for some kind of work it could reduce your performance

to force your CPU work at the entire capacity:

echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

it will improve the experience (on linux)at 120%

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i used to have ubunutstudio for ages that came with real time kernel, so when i saw the option “real time priority” i kinda assumed i knew what it was… thank you for writing this. should i force the cpu? i need to read about this before doing this. can you elaborate on this please? links maybe?

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ubuntu-studio comes with

studio-controls

which greatly helps setting up jack correctly and it’s possible to set cpu-governor with it also. just get rid of kde and use something simpler as fluxbox, icewm or openbox, this should improve performance also.

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I’m seriously thinking about going back to ubuntu-studio, ubuntu has a lot of bling bling that i dont really nead.

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Just a data point, but as of the Linux kernel 5.0 the real-time priority patches have been accepted into the main-line kernel, so it is now possible to run RT on a stock kernel if you need to.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to Ubuntu Studio (I haven’t used it, so I don’t have an opinion), just that as of Linux 5.0 there are more options.

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I m not saying “Do not use Real time” use it, It will allow you reduce latency.

about the CPU governor , I have a link I wrote that :grinning:

but you can read some of this here

It will increase the use of energy and will make your fan work a lot, but it is not something like “Force” the CPU to do something that it can’t do. also it is mandatory for instance, to run modern games on Linux.

edited: CPU frequency scaling - ArchWiki

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For further improvements lower the samplerate to 44.1 and make sure your system hardware is set to the same values so you don’t have to up/downsample. Use larger buffer sizes in the audio interface.

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That’s a really important one. I once accidentally got them out of sync (44.1 vs 48), and yea, you want to do this!

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I moved this conversation to the category where it belongs (not the #lounge) and changed the title so that it reflects the discussion (“SSD disks vs. other ways to improve Rack performances on Linux”). I hope this makes sense :thinking:

Reminder for everyone: please do the same when needed on the topics you created; feel free to suggest me or other moderators to do it on other people’s topics :handshake:

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thanks! i wasn’t happy with my initial title - english is not my mother tongue.

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i’m very aware of that. when i record with VCV recorder (video) i need the biggest buffersize along side 44.1khz. and ofcourse i have to reduce the framerate. thanks

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Thanks a lot for this very interesting discussion I could follow.

Maybe a little off-topic, but possibly helpful for others

On my ca.10 years ‘very’ old PC (i7, 8GB Ram, SSD & HDD Disks, GeForce GTX 285) running Windows 10 Pro, I had my problems to follow some VCV patch files … Yes, I’m still learning :sunglasses:

With help of this discussion here I found the bottleneck on my system :smile: Now I’m setting the Sample Rate of 44.1 kHz, Frame Rate is set to 60Hz (for the moment), the Block Size is setting on the maximum (4096) and now it’s running smoothly.

Thanks again for the food for thought.

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