If you want to check, I have a small (and not very good tbh) benchmarking chapter in my thesis where I detail the steps I have followed to get fairly low schedu

If you want to check, I have a small (and not very good tbh) benchmarking chapter in my thesis where I detail the steps I have followed to get fairly low scheduler tick times of my software - for simple graphs the best I could do was to go to less than 100 microseconds with ~20 microseconds of jitter (p.187) for a tick: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01947309/document https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01947309/document ; also see the intro of section 10.4 with a couple relevant references. Of course that only benchmarks the part that you as a developer can have a meaningful impact on, not the time spent in JACK / ALSA / ... To give an anecdote, with the hardware mentioned at the beginning of said chapter I can reliably put JACK in a 16 samples buffer at 44100 (~0.7 ms) and do a few things without crackles. not a lot though :p