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
• Qt GUI (beta)

Installation

GUI

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

Home directory

Make sure pip is installed, on Ubuntu this would be the python3-pip package. With pip installed you can install rtcqs with the following command. :

pip install --upgrade rtcqs

You can now run rtcqs by simply running rtcqs in a terminal. The GUI can be run with with rtcqs_gui.

Virtual Environment

Make sure the virtual environment module is installed, on Ubuntu this would be 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 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

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

• Extend filesystem check
• Disk scheduler check

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.