Memory bug in SuSE Audacity 2.0.3-80.7.i586 package

[Gale Andrews]

So does rebooting the computer make any difference?

If it does not prove to be bad memory behaviour on your machine when it's asked to do some serious number-crunching, it may be useful at some stage to launch Audacity from the terminal (or better from within the gdb debugger) and see what messages (or gdb output) come up.

Have you added any plug-ins to your computer that show up in Audacity, irrespective if you are using them for your albums?


Gale

[dmarkh]

I added another 8GB of memory to the system and this morning I had no problems at all. No paging detected and no freezes. This indicates to me that there is certainly something amiss somewhere. Should not Audacity run perfectly fine with 4GB of memory on a 32bit OS? Obviously I cannot be sure that it is audacity that is causing this, but I have no issues like this with any other applications on this or any other of my boxes. I know from experience that these types of problems can reveal themselves in many different ways. If it were one of my projects, I would fix no other BUG until this was explained in full.

Regards
Mark

[dmarkh]

So does rebooting the computer make any difference?

If it does not prove to be bad memory behaviour on your machine when it's asked to do some serious number-crunching, it may be useful at some stage to launch Audacity from the terminal (or better from within the gdb debugger) and see what messages (or gdb output) come up.

Have you added any plug-ins to your computer that show up in Audacity, irrespective if you are using them for your albums?"

Hi Gale,

With the 4GB only, I did reboot once or twice but it seemed to make no more difference that just exiting and restarting audacity. I have added no additional plug-ins that I know of. I do keep up to date with the SuSE and Packman repositories when ever it says I need to. What actually happens there is sometimes hard to know. I would like to think that only installed packages are updated but it is possible a package update could cause the requirement of a new package???

I certainly can remove that extra memory I added if you would like me to do something in particular.

Mark

[Gale Andrews]

I added another 8GB of memory to the system and this morning I had no problems at all. No paging detected and no freezes. This indicates to me that there is certainly something amiss somewhere. Should not Audacity run perfectly fine with 4GB of memory on a 32bit OS?

Yes on principle, but it should be stressed if you got that result using the 2.0.3 packaged version of Audacity that Audacity does not control that package or its dependencies.

For example, if you look in the Directories Preferences in the packaged version, is there an "Audio Cache" option? If SuSE decided to reinstate that despite our removing it and that option was enabled, it could explain the problem.

Obviously I cannot be sure that it is audacity that is causing this, but I have no issues like this with any other applications on this or any other of my boxes.

What happens if you edit a large video file with the native SuSE video editor with only 4 GB RAM?

That would be as (or more) demanding than your album edit.

I know from experience that these types of problems can reveal themselves in many different ways. If it were one of my projects, I would fix no other BUG until this was explained in full.

First we have to reproduce the problem. Obviously it is not general that Audacity freezes up when working with a pair of 20-minute tracks.

By all means, experiment with the self-built Audacity with the original 4 GB RAM if you can.


Gale

[dmarkh]

OK this weekend I will go back to 4GB and try what you recommend and get back to ya.

[dmarkh]

When I build from src can I assume that no special options need to be given for ./configure? This is what SuSE does in their spec file:

%configure --docdir=%{_defaultdocdir}/audacity/
%ifnarch %ix86 x86_64
--disable-sse
%endif

FWI: I monitored memory usage for each step in an example of processing an album. It's attached and sort of interesting.

Mark

[Gale Andrews]

When I build from src can I assume that no special options need to be given for ./configure? This is what SuSE does in their spec file:

%configure --docdir=%{_defaultdocdir}/audacity/
%ifnarch %ix86 x86_64
--disable-sse
%endif

I believe we have fixed the DOCDIR issue the first line above may be addressing.

The other line should be irrelevant as you are on a 32-bit machine, so I suggest just default ./configure.


Gale

[dmarkh]

OK this weekend I will go back to 4GB and try what you recommend and get back to ya.

With 4GB memory and running audacity built from the downloaded source everything was fine. No hangs and no paging. The SuSE distributed binary rpm seems to be the source of my problems. I downloaded SuSE's source rpm from Packman and built an RPM from it, and again everything was fine. No hangs or paging. So building audaciity on my box from source, any source, seems to fix my problem.

Sorry for the noise, and thanks for your help.
Mark

[steve]

Thanks for letting us know - I'm glad that you managed to resolve the issue.
It may be worth reporting the issue to SUSE (or the maintainer of that package, depending on what provision they have for bug reports). Hopefully they will be able to fix it for future releases.