Reduce Latency for Specialized Software

Some apps benefits from being run with very low latency, or low potential for lag, stutter, and interruptions from other running software. Most apps don’t need this — not even video games — but some do, including those for professional audio production.

In KDE Linux, apps are allowed to ask for low latency privileges themselves. Any that don’t can be given these privileges manually. If you encounter lag or stuttering in performance-critical apps, here are some methods of doing that:

Give a specific app or process low latency privileges

  1. Launch the app you want to apply low latency privileges to, if it’s not already running.
  2. Open System Monitor.
  3. Locate the app or process on the Applications or Processes page.
  4. Right-click on it and click Set Priority….
  5. In the dialog window that appears, increase the sliders’ priority values and click on the radio buttons for “FIFO” and “Real Time”.

Give all apps or processes low latency privileges

Put your user account in the realtime group by running sudo useradd -G realtime -m $(whoami) in a terminal window.

Note that this is a fairly drastic solution. It may be better to create a new user account, put that user in the realtime group, and only log into that user account to run low-latency-critical apps.

Article contributed by under the CC-BY-4.0 license.