[alsa-devel] buffer time

[Mike Looijmans]

On 08/18/2014 10:34 PM, Joël Krähemann wrote:
> What's the correct buffer time to use with alsa?

Playback or capture?

Anyway, Linux performs at its very worst when faced with typical 
audio/video work, because it tends to postpone things and execute them 
in a single big chunk. This is good for throughput, as it can re-order 
everything so that less harddisk head seeks are required, but it causes 
an application that, say, writes out data at a constant but quite low 
rate, to experience latencies of well over 2 seconds on an otherwise 
idle system.

Because of that, my answer to such a question it usually: All the memory 
that you can spare.
In case of ALSA, that means get the biggest you can possibly get, 
because the DMA buffer is usually pre-allocated when the driver probed, 
so it's going to waste if you don't use it.
-- 
Mike Looijmans