Mulab's CPU efficiency

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Oh, as I said earlier, the crackles already went away when I set the number of cores to 4 instead of 8. I had thought that I should set it to the number of logical cores, not physical cores. Now that I changed that thanks to the remarks on the Mulab page linked earlier, the crackles are gone, no more num overloads, whatever that is.

Switching from 128 to 256 makes little difference in CPU load, the latency is also not that much longer, 7.6 vs 10 ms.

256: task manager: 10% idle, 28% unison patch
Mulab stats: CPU weight 35%
128: task manager: 10% idle, 28% unison patch
Mulab stats: CPU weight 36%

Hardly any difference, but when turning off MC support in Repro 5, Mulab's meter shoots into the red zone immediately and num overloads pile up fast.

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fluffy_little_something wrote:Hardly any difference, but when turning off MC support in Repro 5, Mulab's meter shoots into the red zone immediately and num overloads pile up fast.
That rather makes sense. If running on 4 cores is okay but over 25%, then running on one core is going to be over 100%, yes?

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I don't think it works in a linear fashion the way you suggest.
In Mulab the load difference is pretty much 1:2 rather than 1:4.

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fluffy_little_something wrote:I don't think it works in a linear fashion the way you suggest.
In Mulab the load difference is pretty much 1:2 rather than 1:4.
I have no idea what you're trying to express.

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Reaper was mistake,even wonder how u often talk about trash daw Reaper,used Reaper for a month,then deleted it
SCANDALLY FAMOUS COMPOSER :x
https://raph-t.bandcamp.com/

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Trash DAW, really? One may not like it, but calling it trash is absurd.

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Raph-T wrote:Reaper was mistake,even wonder how u often talk about trash daw Reaper,used Reaper for a month,then deleted it
i am sure you didn't have a thing called "patience" for sure while testing that software .thats all i have to say
Win 10 x64 with specs enough to run DAW without bouncing any track
KZ IEM,32-bit 384Khz dac running at 32bit 48Khz
mainly use REAPER, MTotalbundle, Unfiltered Audio TRIAD and LION, NI classic collection,......... ETC

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fluffy_little_something wrote:Trash DAW, really? One may not like it, but calling it trash is absurd.
+1

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I guess MULAB is a real CPU hog DAW not the software I use although I'm trying to fix it on my own way I freeze tracks (recording the midi into an actual wav samples) just to make MULAB efficient and works fine coz if I continue adding more tracks it will definitely crash.

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What does the Num Overload value mean? Is it bad when it happens? I don't necessarily hear anything when an overload happens, right?
It seems to get reset to zero after a while.

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cloudspell wrote:I guess MULAB is a real CPU hog DAW not the software I use although I'm trying to fix it on my own way I freeze tracks (recording the midi into an actual wav samples) just to make MULAB efficient and works fine coz if I continue adding more tracks it will definitely crash.
Depends a lot on what you do on those tracks. When you use an U-he synth on each, naturally you can only have so many tracks.
I use mostly Sylenth1 and ToneBoosters plugins, all of which are highly optimized. Usually, I can use a lot of tracks before I get into trouble, maybe two dozen tracks or so. A track with a monophonic lead or bass for instance uses very little CPU, it hardly shows up on any meter.

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fluffy_little_something wrote:What does the Num Overload value mean? Is it bad when it happens? I don't necessarily hear anything when an overload happens, right?
An overload is when the audio processing takes too much time. Often this results in a (little) click, which is not ok.

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Strange, it was a rather basic project, just 10% CPU usage. No demanding synth or anything...
It was just 1 overload, I let it loop for 10 minutes, no more overloads...
I get the impression that sometimes such overloads might also be caused by turning plugins on or off.

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You're confusing CPU load and the amount of time available to process a buffer of audio data. (48000 x 32bit samples per second, 128 byte buffer size = 1500 buffers per second, I think?)

You may only be using 1% of the CPU but the processing time might still exceed that needed to complete generation of a buffer due to a sudden delay in the processing path (which could be anything, e.g. disk spinning up, stealing the CPU core that was needed, anything...). That one spike won't show up as significant CPU load (it's a stolen less than 1/1500 seconds off one core, right?) but it'll still caused a drop out.
Last edited by pljones on Mon Jan 08, 2018 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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fluffy_little_something wrote:Strange, it was a rather basic project, just 10% CPU usage. No demanding synth or anything...
It was just 1 overload, I let it loop for 10 minutes, no more overloads...
I get the impression that sometimes such overloads might also be caused by turning plugins on or off.
That's possible. When switching VST plugs on/off they can choose to do special things during their processing. That's up to the VST.

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