And also on computers generally lol.

The situation: I’m trying out Bitwig on my geriatric computer, which is running Linux Mint. It seems that I can’t do very much without spiking the DSP, leading to awful glitchiness in playback. However, according to btop, the CPU (i7 4770) load isn’t breaking 30%, spread evenly across the cores.

Things I have tried:

• uninstalling speech dispatcher, which helped
• tweaking the pipewire config, which doesn’t seem to have helped much

So… what is the bottleneck here?

EDIT: the (main) issue was that my user didn’t have real time priority permissions. An edit to /etc/security/limits.conf has improved things immeasurably.