Complete preformance breakdown

[ludwigcs]

I have not been able to use almost any of the pre's since the version change because of a complete breakdown in performance. When I reinstall 2.301 everyting is back to normal though, so I'm sure it's something having to do with the newer versions. Then problem is so bad that it won't even play the demo project. I've tested this on a couple of computers, but for purposes of this post, I will only list the specifics on one.

Acer Aspire 5100, AMD Turion 64 MK-36 2.00 GHz, 1024 Mb shared memory, realtek audio, ATI Radeon Xpess 1100, Windows Vista Home Premium.

I really really hope this is not the direction that Reaper is headed in. I love the features that are in the works, but if it means the performance is going to take a direct hit, they will be worthless.

[schwa]

I'm not aware of anything that would cause a performance hit in the pre release versions compared to 2.301. Could you possibly post the very smallest project you can that shows a clear CPU difference on your system between 2.301 and the latest pre release version?

[Dstruct]

I'm not aware of anything that would cause a performance hit in the pre release versions compared to 2.301.

maybe the new "Automatic" thread behaviour setting is causing it on his system?

@ludwigcs: try setting it back to "4 - Default" (preferences/audio/buffering) ...

[ludwigcs]

I would, but it boggs my system down so badly when I press play that I can't do anything at all until I get it to stop. I can't figure it out, but I've tried changing the audio configuration (including thread behavior), buffer settings, shutting down everything running in the background on my pc.... basically everything that I can think of. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

I tried this just a minute ago.... My other system didn't totally bog down, but definitely experienced a performance drop. It is the box that I actually record on and is a dedicated system. I'm having audio drop outs on a project with 15 tracks and only 5 effects(all cockos). The system is on a nvidia motherboard running an AMD Athlon at 2.4 GHz. 1024 memory running a MOTU 828 on ASIO drivers. Again, when I rolled the Reaper version back to 2.301 everything worked fine. I'll try to get a screen shot of the cpu activity and post it.

[schwa]

That was a great idea with the thread behavior -- Dandruff is right, that is something important that changed, and it's possible the behavior on Vista is different from the behavior on XP. ludwigcs, it would be great if you could try to do a direct comparison on 2.301 vs 2.4-with-thread-behavior-4.

[Dstruct]

I would, but it boggs my system down so badly when I press play that I can't do anything at all until I get it to stop.

Why don't you go into the preferences without pressing the playback button first?

[slops]

@ludwigcs: try setting it back to "4 - Default" (preferences/audio/buffering) ...

....THANK YOU DANDRUFF!!!!!!!!!!!

i had started a similar thread (http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=23005) a couple days ago and could not figure out what the problem was.

it was the thread behavior!!!

once i set it back to "4 - default" everything worked fine (no more glitches).

and just to make sure, i tested it over and over by switching back and forth between "Default" and "Automatic." for some reason while playing a project, zooming in and out with the scrollwheel while set on "automatic" would make reaper flip out. lots of glitching, tracks dropping outs, midi notes getting stuck.... but when putting it on default i could not get it to glitch at all!

thanks again for pointing that out.

[schwa]

Slops, are you on XP or Vista?

[slops]

Slops, are you on XP or Vista?

i'm on XP.

...and i'm also running a dinosaur of a computer compared to most people.

2ghz single core pentium4
1 gig of ram


and yes, thats right. i am indeed running a single core system....ohh the humanity.
:)

[Justin]

So maybe automatic mode has problems on single core? I should check my only remaining single core test box.. ;)

[Art Evans]

Do hang onto that box, Justin! It's important to get low-spec PC users on board who may then keep Reaper as their DAW of choice as they move up to better hardware. The 'education' sector is an important one, as the discounts offered to that sector by some of the major players indicate - I'm afraid I don't believe it is entirely a matter of philanthropy!

[Justin]

Do hang onto that box, Justin! It's important to get low-spec PC users on board who may then keep Reaper as their DAW of choice as they move up to better hardware. The 'education' sector is an important one, as the discounts offered to that sector by some of the major players indicate - I'm afraid I don't believe it is entirely a matter of philanthropy!

Of course I'll hang on to it ;) Actually have a few, though only one that I routinely use for audio stuff. But having said that, I've used recent builds on it without any problem.. so maybe it's some driver specific thing actually.. :)

-Justin

[ludwigcs]

Geez, I didn't realize my pc was that far out of date..... I just got it last year. Anyhow, as you might have gathered by now, I am on a single core pc. Maybe it's time to upgrade. I did look into the thread behavior setting again and switched it to default as suggested. I didn't get a screen shot, but while playing the cpu usage was only at 40-50% and there were occasional periods of severe audio drop outs. This leads me to believe that the problem is somewhere between Reaper and my audio drivers(on both of my pc's). I've been using reaper to record all of my personal projects since reaper was in beta development and to this point I have never had a performance problem of this magnitude. If this problem is what lies in the future of Reaper, I must say I'm rather disappointed. I love the direction of the current development of this software and I truly wish to continue using the software, but I have no performance problems at all with Cakewalk at all(even though I really don't like using it) on the PC that I use. I'm really not in a position to buy a new PC.... that would be a major setback for me and my plans. I just hope Reapers advancing feature set doesn't get ahead of the capabilities of my hardware(I just don't see why it would since other recording software works fine) or this will be a serious step in the wrong direction.

Chris

[bullshark]

I didn't notice any difference in the performance of my lower-paleolithic-era Athlon in the newest build. You're probably using Asio4all generic driver with that audio chip? frankly, I'd look into that as the source of the problem.

That brings the question: why are you using the inboard chip at all? Nowadays, you can get an Audiophile brand new for like 100 buck, and it's in another dimension of sonic clarity, not to mention performance and stability, compared to that cheap Realtek stuff; I kid you not, when I replaced the onboard audio with an Audiophile years ago, it was like somebody removed a bunch of pillows from the front of my monitors.

[ludwigcs]

I use my laptop to access the internet, download and test the updates before I put them on the box in my studio. I never do any serious audio work on my laptop. That being said... I have never had a problem with Reaper until now and as I stated above, my actual recording interface is a MOTU 828. I'm having performance problems on that box too..... They all stop when I use 2.301.... something's wrong, I don't know what, I wish it wasn't, but it is. I even reloaded my laptop just to see if there was something going on there and it still happened on a clean OS. I wish there was more info I could pass on about it. Maybe if there's something else I could pass on to you Justin, please let me know.

Chris

[schwa]

If this problem is what lies in the future of Reaper, I must say I'm rather disappointed.

There can always be a bug, and there can always be some new variable introduced that affects some systems differently from others, but to be clear, there is no "designed in" increase in CPU usage between 2.301 and 2.4. New features like scrub and parameter modulation should not have any effect on CPU use when you're not using those features.

Ludwigcs, to track down the particular cause of your problem, anything you can do to narrow it down would be helpful. Specifically, if there's any way to post a small project that shows a clear CPU difference on your system between 2.301 and 2.4, that would give us a lot of information.

[Art Evans]

Did you try the fix in post 7 above?

[ludwigcs]

Art:
Yes. It did yield some short term results as Reaper would play normally for a couple of seconds and then all hell would break loose.

Schwa: I don't have a screen shot to upload, but I can tell you that the cpu meter doesn't do anything outlandish when the dropouts occur. The audio just goes off of the wall and the gui practically stops, but the cpu usage reads a normal range. The dropout isn't reflected in the cpu graph either when I get the thing stopped.

There are moments of normal operation and then everything goes bad. If it's operating normally, I can instigate the problem by scrubbing the audio.... that almost always starts it on a downward spiral. Another note is that when I downloaded the latest scrub updated executable, the problem seemed to have lessened for some reason, but after a couple of minutes of operation the problem begins again. When I scrub the audio, Reaper almost completely freezes and I have to wait about 30 seconds for a recovery before I can do anything at all on the PC. In addition, a vertical zoom will cause some audio glitches during normal operation, but I don't know if that's at all related to this problem.

I apologize if I sounded a bit brash in my last post.... I am becoming frustrated. I do understand that there will be bugs and I hope I can in some way provide some information that will help solve this one. In any case, thanks for the help!

[Art Evans]

I wonder whether the scrubbing is driving your soundcard/interface nuts in a manner that would only be seen on the DPC Latency Check display (http://www.thesycon.com/deu/latency_check.shtml) - worth a try given that it's a small free download and dead handy anyway.

[sceyefeye]

hmmmmnnnn

yes ok, I am a sucker for bleeding edge, can't help myself

But in the 24 pre series I am getting crackles and other sounds that I am not deliberately generating. Thought that it might be a RAM issue, but the worst of things seem to go away if I change from the ASIO4ALL driver to WDM Kernel Streaming then I have no problem

Glad that things work without ASIO but have gotten so used to ASIO4ALL as my primary driver......

Interestingly on my laptop, I cannot run either Reaper or Reason through ASIO4ALL if the A/C power is disconnected.

The track renders fine however, so it must be in the real time environment that things are a bit weird.

BTW HP Compaq 6710b laptop with internal sound etc and 1gig of ram, so nothing fancy but has been up to the task till now. In fact CPU and performance is nowhere near maxed out at all.


EDIT:
My bad, had changed a setting - I had enabled Anticipative FX Processing, which I had never used before, now I know why

[Dstruct]

But in the 24 pre series I am getting crackles and other sounds that I am not deliberately generating. Thought that it might be a RAM issue, but the worst of things seem to go away if I change from the ASIO4ALL driver to WDM Kernel Streaming then I have no problem

maybe this

optimized heap usage to increase low latency performance change in 2.4pre1 gives this problem!? don't know ...

[ludwigcs]

OK... here's a new piece of info on my little problem. Maybe this will shed some light on something. I enabled the RT cpu meter and graphing which I was unaware of until I was tinkering around with it. Anyway, when the playback anomally occurs, the RT CPU usage goes way up, but the overall usage shows no change... I don't understand it, but that's what happens. Just wanted to throw that out there.

BTW.... this happened when I tried it in rc0.

[3mph]

Interestingly on my laptop, I cannot run either Reaper or Reason through ASIO4ALL if the A/C power is disconnected.
Maybe your laptop "clocks down" to save power. I have a program installed on my laptop that does that. It saves me a couple of those critical minutes sometimes :-)

Im certainly not an expert in this area, but if Reaper changed the way it utilizes the (single core) CPU, maybe this is CPU-related? I might be far out, but isn't it true that different CPU handles math in different ways - I mean, that stuff we used to have FPU to do? Maybe you cockos geniuses should look into what kind of math-operations you've changed.. But it's probably just noob-nonsence ;-)

[sceyefeye]

Maybe your laptop "clocks down" to save power. I have a program installed on my laptop that does that. It saves me a couple of those critical minutes sometimes :-)


Well yes, I would guess that this is nothing that Justin and co can address as it is beyond the realm of Reaper. And it is not exactly a train smash or anything, just got one hell of a fright the first time I experienced it. Thoughts of "oh gad, there goes my hardware" but it isn't exactly hard to work around so I am no longer bothered

And as you say, a couple of more minutes of battery life is always good

[Justin]

Can anyone who thinks 2.4 performs worse than 2.301 compare the normal 2.4rc2 build with http://landoleet.org/reaper24rc2_altperf-install.exe (rc2_altperf) and see if they differ substantially?

Thanks,

Justin

[sceyefeye]

Can anyone who thinks 2.4 performs worse than 2.301 compare the normal 2.4rc2 build with http://landoleet.org/reaper24rc2_altperf-install.exe (rc2_altperf) and see if they differ substantially?

Thanks,

Justin

Hey Justin did I miss this? Landoleet seems to only have reaper24-install.exe nothing with alteperf or am I being completely blonde here? Trying the new build anyhow in the meantime - tx

EDIT
Just downloaded and installed, yeah bleeding edge junkie. I think there is an improvement in this build, am still getting drop outs but I suspect that it is due to having a 3d rendering happening at the same time.

Ok rendering stopped, performance meter is indicating up to 25% CPU usage and the only dropout I got was switching between reaper and firefox to continue my edit.

Thanks Justin, for me at any rate, this is a much improved build. Now you going to put egg on my face by telling me nothing actually changed aren't you? :)

[Dstruct]

Landoleet seems to only have reaper24-install.exe

looks like this will be the final 2.4 release. testing finished.

[ludwigcs]

Can anyone who thinks 2.4 performs worse than 2.301 compare the normal 2.4rc2 build with http://landoleet.org/reaper24rc2_altperf-install.exe (rc2_altperf) and see if they differ substantially?

Thanks,

Justin

The difference on my computer is monumental. RC2 with the alt perf modification outperformed the standard rc2 by more than 50%. I don't know what you did different(obviously) but I hope you keep it in there.

[sceyefeye]

Hi Justin, yes it would seem that I have absolutely nothing better to do with my time than play with Reaper (wish it was true)

Just downloaded reaper24rc2_altperf2-install.exe which appears to be a newer build again.

I noticed an improvement in the plain old RC already, but now just to be difficult I am running another render in the back ground, have sketchup open, plus open office and reaper is playing fine.

Same track that I have been playing with last night and earlier is just playing away merrily.

Whatever you have done has certainly got my computer running on steroids. Either that or an aural placebo

[Art Evans]

Try rebooting between tests to ensure a level playing field. On my PC, repeated tests get significantly better even with the same program version due to disk buffering (it seems). Even with 42 tracks the drive does nothing for quite some time the second time the project plays.