rtcqs 0.6.6

Linux audio performance analyzer

Introduction

rtcqs is a Python utility to analyze your system and detect possible bottlenecks that could have a negative impact on the performance of your system when working with Linux audio. It is heavily inspired by raboof’s excellent realtimeconfigquickscan script.

Features

Basically the same as realtimeconfigquickscan:

• Root check

• Audio group check

• CPU frequency check

• High resolution timers check

• Preempt RT check

• rtprio check

• Swappiness check

• Filesystem check

Additional features:

• Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT, also known as hyper-threading) check

• Spectre/Meltdown mitigations check

• Basic IRQ check of sound cards and USB ports

• Power management check

• tkinter GUI

Installation

GUI

If you want to use the GUI you will have to install the python3-tk package or similar for your distro.

Virtual Environment

Make sure the pip and the Python virtual environment module packages are installed, on Ubuntu these would be python3-pip and python3-venv. Then create a virtual environment in a directory of choice and install rtcqs in there.

mkdir -p ~/path/to/rtcqs
cd ~/path/to/rtcqs
python3 -m venv venv &&
. venv/bin/activate &&
pip install --upgrade rtcqs

You can now run rtcqs by simply running rtcqs in a terminal. The GUI can be run with rtcqs_gui. Next time you’d like to run the script or the GUI load the virtual environment again and run either rtcqs or rtcqs_gui.

. venv/bin/activate
rtcqs
rtcqs_gui

Editable Installation

It is also possible to use a so-called “editable installation”. This allows you to run the commands directly, without having to load the virtual environment.

mkdir -p ~/path/to/rtcqs
cd ~/path/to/rtcqs
git clone https://codeberg.org/rtcqs/rtcqs.git .
python3 -m venv venv
venv/bin/pip install -e .

You can now run rtcqs by running ~/path/to/rtcqs/venv/bin/rtcqs in a terminal. The GUI can be run with ~/path/to/rtcqs/venv/bin/rtcqs_gui.

Overview

When running the GUI it will immediately show the results of the checks. All checks have their own tab. Each tab title consists of a symbol that shows the check result and the name of the check. A ✔ means the check was successful while a ✘ means rtcqs encountered an issue. This way you can quickly spot which checks have issues.

Clicking ‘Cancel’ will close rtcqs. Clicking ‘About’ will bring up a popup window which displays the version and a short description.

rtcqs main window (tkinter version)

rtcqs about window (tkinter version)

Future plans

• Disk scheduler check (first asses what impact different schedulers have on performance)

• Improve swappiness check (get amount of RAM and work with that)

• Ditch PySimpleGUI which is not open source anymore and move to pygubu or even popsicle (how audio would that be)

Contact

To contact me send me a mail or if it’s a technical issue or question, use this project’s issue tracker.

Thanks

Many thanks of course to the original author of realtimeconfigquickscan, Arnout Engelen a.k.a. raboof.