# Liquidsoap

## audio stream generation

### Usage optimisations for liquidsoap.

This page lists various optimizations that can be used for running liquidsoap under various conditions and hardware.

#### Load optimization.

On machine with several cores, liquidsoap's load can be reduced by splitting computations into several processes. This will ease the operating system to balance the load of the processes to the various cores.

For communicating between the instances, you can use the `{input,output}.jack` operators, but this does not communicate metadata and breaks (end of tracks). You can also give a try to the experimental `{input,output}.marshal` operators, but using them can be troublesome.

Also, using an external encoder helps reducing the load. However, it is not recommended for any format using the ogg format.

#### Memory usage.

Liquidsoap uses caml's `float` to represent raw audio data. While this is a great optimization for CPU usage, this may consume a lot of memory, in particular when buffering a lot of data.

If you want to optimize memory usage in this kind of situations, the global setting `set("buffering.kind","raw")` will force data buffering to be done in PCM S16LE format, which representation in memory is smaller.

However, in this case, data will be translated back and forth for each buffering, leading to some computational cost.

Other possible values for this operator are:

- `"default"`: standard representation.
- `"disk"`: will store temporary data in several big files.
- `"disk_manyfiles"`: will store temporary data in a lot of small files. This option is less CPU-consuming than `"disk"`.

For data stored on disk, the temporary directory can be set using the `set("buffering.path", "/new/path")` command.

The disk caching can also be used along with ramfs or tmpfs. In this case, files are also put in the RAM however, the temporary data is no longer managed by liquidsoap. This may help to reduce the load generated by the garbage collector when dealing with important amount of allocated memory.