Michael Tyson of The Amazing Audio Engine wrote an excellent article on his A Tasty Pixel blog: Four common mistakes in audio development that should be required reading for Audio programmers. I won’t go into much detail since you should already be at his site instead of this one. But, in case you are still here, I’ll also point you to his Realtime Watchdog tool that he used to profile various audio libraries and you should use to check your apps as well.
The Amazing Audio Engine, and therefore Michael Tyson, is an inspiration to us all, even if our libraries differ in purpose and execution.