Acer laptop harddrive latency isssue, urgent help please

[florkii]

himalaya
of course i understand if u do not have the time, so be it..
but you are saying it performs well with asio under sonar, there might be different components other than my bigger 4mb cache, like Devon suggested a south bridge difference perhaps,
i'm probably sending it in either in 15hours or i might drive 200km and drop it off and that might give me an extra 24 hours..phoning them tomorrow
curious bout your reults anyhow..

another thought i have is reinstalling as standard pc but i dont know if that is valid with core 2duo's and it's gonna take a while just to test, bios doesn't specify hardware IRQ's and in windows of course there are no conflicts
so it might just be a waste of 3 hours and i've got to get all the drivers from the web, etc
anyone think i should give it a try? downgrading in windows from ACPI to standard?

[florkii]

wow 100views in an hour or 2,
this sure is the right forum.

anybody else know any other places i could also go for help?

[DevonB]

Oh god, leave it at ACPI. Standard really won't buy you anything except a nightmare of configuring your own IRQ's now. Really, it shouldn't be an issue.

The perfmon metrics show your drive is kickin' butt! 1400+ i/o's a second on read? Awesome (and thank your cache on that too). Notice that your queue depth is no higher than 2, which is perfect. Higher than 2 shows a disk bottleneck. Considering you're pushing 1000+ I/O's with no bottleneck, it ain't the drive.

It sounds like something on the southbridge could be interrupting traffic and getting priority. Trying to remember if you said you disabled NIC and/or Wireless LAN options on this? Make *SURE* that all networking is turned off. That can hog a bus sometimes. PCI Latency you could look into, for sure. If you have high numbers for certain devices (higher means it hogs the PCI bus longer) that could do it too... but I doubt it in this situation. Check it though, I could be wrong.

Devon

[florkii]

hi Devon thanks for sticking with me
gonna test again on all disablings,

trying disabling stuff in bios now but when i tried this last time after a fresh install windows froze after startup loading some of the acer security modules and cant seem to interpret how they're all connected
as i thought it isn't the disk because using the external gives the same values in DPC -do you know this program?
bottlenecking i think is the issue, but not sure how to check this with perfmon
it does show a 3 once so that might be the one time perfmon actually captured the problem as it happens in short brief moments as bursts exactly when the disk starts a read or write ( presumably taking all of the file then and processing it in cache which doesn't cause dropouts anymore)

looking for a pci timer app right now - lost the old one somewhere
but i thoought that was also being shown by DPC, might hagve to find one where i can change it like with the old via board i once had, was a miraclemaker..

checking now if in windows everything disabled..

[florkii]

some amount of succes after disabling infrared in bios

this has made the issue appear less, but it still occurs mostly when i import several files somehow lining up several read and write operations at a certain point hogs the cpu, it is not so that i am loading very many i mean i could easily load several on old pc, but three or four files seems too much here for a 3x better laptop, so there is still an issue at hand, bottlenecking ??

gonna tweak xp all over again and try to squeeze performance to see if it persists, but overall i feel it's gotta work
i'm not satisfied yet though
thank you guys for helping me so far, i really should have checked twice

and himalaya what audiocard are you using?

[himalaya]

Hi,
Just here last time before I hit the bedroom...sorry didn't get any time to test it. But I will do so in the morning.

Soundcrad:
I use Echo's Indigo I/O (PCMCIA CardBusII).

What I have observed is that I can have a much greater buffer setting on this card - and still be able to play without any troubling latency - than my Terratec PCI soundcard in my desktop. ( I'm not really an expert when it comes to this , so I remain blisfully ignorant about how and why this may be, lol)

[florkii]

thanks himalaya and goodnight to you

your cardbus soundcard is definately better quality but so many variables need to be taken into account...

meanwhile the problem still persists
pci latency timer shows all 0000 values for all 13 devices so ??
looking for another one..
i'll be here in the morning

[Ja.x]

What Acer model are you talking about? I bought an Aspire 5634WLMi a couple of months ago and intend to use it for music someday, but so far I'm still using my old desktop, so no idea how it performs...

[florkii]

taking back what i said about your soundcard
i read rme instead of echo (getting tired here) but the terratec might be the better one , you want to have buffer sizes as small as possible for lower latency, you might not notice it, and that is a different debate alltogether, but it is a fact that the better the audiointerface and driver the lower the latency(lower buffer) you can get. playback without glitches of course.

inexperience is a non issue, we've all been there and you are putting the effort out for me he.

i'll describe the test in simple steps again
load your host and put your soundcard latency to a medium buffer say 1024samples this translates into 20ish seconds latency, not counting your input latency wich will effectively double the total latency if you don't compensate for it in your host by disabling inputs or setting some negative buffer.
you should now be able to play larger audiofiles say above 20mb without hiccups or glitches, and you can use the free/sharware prog DPC latency checker to confirm that your machine can handle realtime audio, very simple just launch it no install required.
now the actual test, start lauding a few large samples or tracks upwards of 20mb, 5 or six of them while maintaining playback
do you get glitches like me and does DPC show large red values corresponding to read write disk operations? curious..
also is your system optimized for audio? tweak xp?

further investigation leads me to believe there may be a problem with the ram acces time...
tried disabling the swapfile altogether, was previously fixed size, but still no good..
pci latency timer anyone?

[florkii]

Acer Travelmate 6592g 301Mn a core2duo T7300 2.2Ghz
1Gb 1 stick unbranded RAM 800Mhz FSb
internal harddisk WD 5400rpm SATA 160Gb
3partitions 10Gb Restore,60Gb System and 70Gb Data

i have until tomorrow to test it can have my money back if i return it
and been sick this week so i only got started 48hours ago, non stop trying to find a solution, but like i said acer swap component types and manufacturers even between revisions of the same models, besides you're not running the same generation with fsb 800 and all so its tough to compare but stil i'm very interested how your machine performs..could you try the simple test?

[florkii]

narrowing down the problem even more :
running either ableton or traktor simply playing back audio without loading anything, and meanwhile copying heavily in windows explorer does not result in dropouts. so it must be the way both these programs handle importing of audiofiles that makes the problem, they both do so by loading the audiofile in cache or ram? when first loaded, and that's when glitches occur.
searching the net for a pci latency timer changing utility i have not found another one, besides some for old via agp cards..
but since my bios doesn't allow me to see these values either i suspect that's the reason these soft utils are not working.
came across another util allowing changing the cpu-to-pci latency to 0,
but again for old via boards so the quest continues

anyone know a good tech forum, something current, overclockers/gamers seem to know about these kinds of things but i'm looking for the good forums where people actually help, im on a clock now..

[florkii]

other possible causes
found under control panel/system/system devices this :
ISAPNP Read Data-port
if this is using the old isa interfacing it may well be slowing everything down, curious to what it is..
also there are thermal zones and possibly some kind of cooling,pherhaps directly on the cache or ram? really wild guesses here
but awaiting Devon's return to learn me to check for bottlenecks with perfmon

[DevonB]

I was really only interested in your disk bottleneck to see if there was one since you were getting glitches. Your results showed me there were no bottlenecks in the disk subsystem.

I've never used Ableton Live! but I'm willing to bet it loads audio into memory and streams it from memory. That would explain why the lack of glitches except when loading initially. One single stick of memory means you're also in single channel instead of dual channel memory mode.

You turning of Infrared support and things got 'better' shows to me that it's southbridge devices interferring with the bus (all things that are not video, or memory are on the 'slow' southbridge.) What else is left that's still enabled? Are things any better or worse when it's plugged into the wall vs running on batteries? Just trying to think of other things that might be dorking with the system..... What about power profile from Control Panel? You're not in some economy mode are you? Sorry, the only laptop I currently have here sitting next to me is running Vista, otherwise I'd look.

Devon

[florkii]

running full speed no power savings, disabling infrared improved very slightly actually, i have perfected the test case and am now checking out perfmon for bottlenecks i understand how it works now
btw nearly everything is disabled except under system devices things like that ISAPNP i mentioned cant disable it..

[DevonB]

Get Sisoft Sandra and look at chipset components for your various parts (north and south bridge, ide, usb, etc.) This will give you stuff to search for on Google for problems as well. For example, there might be a problem with your SATA chipset and an update might be available for that speicifc chipset. If you're that dedicated to figuring this out, it's worth a shot, but you need to dig in at the very guts of the components at this point.

Ain't perfmon great? Lots of good info for finding out what your machine is doing from an OS perspective. It won't tell you low level hardware information though, like how much data the north and south bridge are pushing between them, for example, or how much data the PCI bus os coping with at any one time, I do not believe.

Devon