I have a question with unclear "appropriate venue", and am wondering what might be the right place, if not here.

On my desktop (16 core ryzen7) a midi file will simply not play smoothly in rosegarden. Most notable are dropouts in the middle of notes.
The same midi file plays just fine on rosegarden running on an ibook (single core g4), a laptop that is over twenty years old. Rosegarden might take a minute to load up, but after that it plays OK without dropouts or stutter.

Things I have tried, in no particular order:
(1) quitting all other applications (yes, including pulseaudio)
(2) disabling unused audio devices - echo 1 > "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.1/${apropos}/remove"
(3) fuzzing with buffers via qjackctl. this can make the problem worse, but can't fix it.
(4) rebooting with and without #2 above.

So. It's not processing power. It's not conflict with other applications. It's not the fact that there are nowadays four to thirty audio devices on a motherboard to interface with. it's not PA or PW.

What might I be overlooking?

Desktop is running devuan daedelus, with daedalus-updates, daedalus-security, and daedalus-backports. Laptop is running debian unstable, because not much else will install these days.  The midi file is a rendition of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in Dm.

I'm going through the kernel menuconfig hoping to create a smaller desktop kernel.

Going through and looking at each option, it's striking how often I come across help text that reads like, "If you don't know what this is, it is safe to say no here" - yet it's enabled.

And there's a lot of help text that looks... legacy. Like, KVM. What common off-the-shelf processors nowadays do not support it?

So anyways, the question: is there a straightforward way to turn off the things that don't need enabling except for owning arcane hardware? I get that having gone to the trouble of writing a module might bias an author to suggest it needs to be on by default!