autostatic/rtcqs

rtcqs, pronounced arteeseeks, is a Python port of the realtimeconfigquickscan project.

rtcqs

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:

• 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.

rtcqs's Issues

raboof licensed under GPL 2, this project can't be MIT

Arch Linux uses 'realtime' group instead of 'audio' group.

Hi here and thanks for this piece of usefull code.
After an improvment for non swap systems two years ago, I would to have another enhancement of the code.

On Arch Linux, the user don't need to be part of the audio group. Instead 'realtime' group is created when installing 'realtime-privileges' package.

Is there a way to check if the system is Arch Linux, if so the package is installed or the realtime group is present on the system and if the user is in this group?

Thanks.