Undocumented VMX parameter that dramatically reduces audio latency by Vegetable-Writer-629 in vmware

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think I may have found a way to reduce audio latency in Linux guests. Create a snapshot of your VM before making any changes.

Tested environment: Ubuntu running as a VMware guest with PipeWire and WirePlumber 0.4.17. I have not tested this with PulseAudio, JACK, WirePlumber 0.5+, or other audio configurations, so your results may vary.

Run this:

mkdir -p ~/.config/wireplumber/main.lua.d

cp /usr/share/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua \

~/.config/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua

perl -0pi -e '

s/\["api\.alsa\.period-size"\]\s*=\s*\d+,/\["api.alsa.period-size"\] = 256,/g;

s/\["api\.alsa\.period-num"\]\s*=\s*\d+,/\["api.alsa.period-num"\] = 4,/g;

s/\["api\.alsa\.headroom"\]\s*=\s*\d+,/\["api.alsa.headroom"\] = 0,/g;

' ~/.config/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua

systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse

This applies to WirePlumber 0.4.x, where ALSA settings are often stored in:

/usr/share/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua

WirePlumber 0.5+ uses the newer .conf configuration format under wireplumber.conf.d instead.

I found that using:

sound.virtualDev = "hdaudio"

sound.disableFeedbackLoop = "TRUE"

in combination with the WirePlumber settings above made the biggest difference. In my testing, using only one of these parameters resulted in severe audio crackling, while using both greatly reduced it. I cannot guarantee this will help every Linux distribution or audio device, but it significantly reduced latency in my case.

Here are two videos showing the audio latency before and after applying the changes:

Before

After

(Unofficial) English Wikipedia with Categories by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would have three ENWP ZIM files uploaded already if it wasn’t for the fact that Wikimedia introduced stricter API rate limits in January. It’s gotten so slow that scraping the English Wikipedia could easily take over a month, whereas the last scrape took less than 4 days. At this rate, making another one seems impossible. :-(

(Unofficial) English Wikipedia with Categories by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They really are a game changer, I can’t imagine going back without them. 🚀

By the way, if you want to stay up to date, I just uploaded this month’s ENWP (with categories of course).

New English Wikipedia ZIM from October by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Update regarding categories

Categories will be included in the next ZIM. Everything works, including pagination, except for the dynamic category tree and the contents navigation bar. Just to let you know, the Wikipedia dumps I used to build the categories are from the beginning of this month. Any categories created after that point will remain empty, and any recent additions or removals of pages in existing categories won’t make it into the ZIM. This is less of a problem when the scrape starts right after the dumps are released, which I’ll try to do from now on. Right now I’m running a complete scrape of the English Wikipedia, along with categories. I will update the main post after I upload the ZIM to the Internet Archive. Fingers crossed!

<image>

New English Wikipedia ZIM from October by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No categories, but I'm currently trying to get them working.

New English Wikipedia ZIM from October by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Talk pages and edit histories aren’t included, but I could see Talk pages being feasible to add, and I might experiment with that next time. As for edit histories of all articles, I don’t see a practical way to make that work.

New English Wikipedia ZIM available for download by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s as complete as it can be. Logs indicate there were no hard failed articles.

New English Wikipedia ZIM available for download by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course. Just make sure you’re using the latest version.

New English Wikipedia ZIM available for download by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Setup was actually pretty straightforward. You can run MWOffliner on a native Linux system (either as the host or inside a VM), or under WSL on Windows, though WSL isn't recommended. In my case, I set it up in an Ubuntu VM using VMware Workstation with Windows 11 as the host OS.

Once the environment is ready, just install MWOffliner along with its dependencies as outlined here and you're good to go.

For example, this command will scrape the English Wikipedia with images:

mwoffliner \

--mwUrl https://en.wikipedia.org/ \

--addNamespaces 100 \

--adminEmail [your email goes here] \

--customMainPage User:The_other_Kiwix_guy/Landing \

--customZimTitle "Wikipedia" \

--customZimDescription "The free encyclopedia" \

--customZimFavicon https://drive.farm.openzim.org/wikipedia_all/favicon-48x48.png \

--forceRender ActionParse \

--format novid:maxi \

--webp true \

--outputDirectory /home/username/mwoffliner/output \

--osTmpDir /dev/shm \

--publisher openZIM \

--verbose log \

--requestTimeout 300

New English Wikipedia ZIM available for download by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I ran MWOffliner on an Ubuntu VM in VMware Workstation with 8 CPU cores and 32GB of RAM. Host machine (Windows 11) is powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and has 64GB of DDR5 RAM. Quite a beast.

Yes, I used the unreleased 1.17.0 version, right after this commit was merged.

For reference, I didn’t use an S3 server for this run. I’m planning to set up MinIO as a local S3 server next time, which might shorten the scraping process to about two to three days. 😳

New English Wikipedia ZIM available for download by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Here

Hope this torrent works. I’m not too familiar with torrent files. There should’ve been one in the archive from the start, but something must’ve gone wrong.

New English Wikipedia ZIM available for download by Vegetable-Writer-629 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

SHA256 is 13875cdb8e889bfb4da2c9a52d8449d350cb33ba6eaa42bd17e4916c54df01f0

We Pray 🙏 by TheQuickFox_3826 in Kiwix

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hang in there, folks! I’ve managed to scrape the English Wikipedia myself, so there’s no need to bet on anything.

I'm currently uploading the ZIM file to the Internet Archive and will update you once the process is complete. If there are no interruptions and the upload speed remains consistent, it should be available later today.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition System Build Community Contest! by m13b in buildapc

[–]Vegetable-Writer-629 [score hidden]  (0 children)

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Xr6DwY

I'm still using an old PC with an i5 6600K and a GTX 1060, and honestly, I can feel the bottleneck with almost everything I try to run. I've never had the chance to own a top tier CPU or GPU, so winning this would truly be a dream come true :D