[PD] -asio startup flags

[Wakefield Graham]

Hi,

Firstly, apologies to the list to send such a dull first message; I'm really
enjoying getting my teeth into PD, but I'm suffering some rather unlikely
latencies from my soundcard & I wondered if there was any better
explanations of the startup flags that the ones in the Doc (chapter 3).

I'm using an Edirol UA-100 on a Sony Vaio on win98SE, and the soundcard
provides 3 ASIO drivers (native, MME & DirectSound); using another
application (AudioMulch) with the native ASIO driver I can get a workable
latency of 34ms by specifying 3 buffers of 2048 bytes each.  Using the PD
starting up -asio -audiodev X (for the native driver) I get a latency of
730ms!!  Dropping -audiobuf below 50 causes stuttering of the audio, but
while I can get -blocksize down to about 16 it doesn't affect latency.  I
don't understand what -frags or -sleeptime or -rt do, or how to use them,
but I wonder if they may help?

I've tried the other ASIO drivers of the soundcard, but they either do not
permit full-duplex, or cause cpu overload.

Could anyone offer any guidance as to the other flag settings, and if there
is any way I could specify the number and size of buffers as I have in
AudioMulch?

Many thanks, 

Graham