Project Performance considerations

Airal · 10-23-2016, 05:26 PM

When I use reaper I tend to only have a few complaints. They tend to be inefficiencies in the workflow or performance issues.

I've had this issue for quite some time and it becomes a major issue when I near a project finish due to the overloading of the comp.

The problem is midi editing. When I double click a midi item it generally takes 20+ seconds to open and then 20+ seconds to close. This is regardless of how many notes are in the item.

I do not know why this happens but it seems to be either a bug or more likely a performance issue.

Could reaper not cache what it needs to open/view/edit the midi items so it doesn't take so long? I'm not sure what reaper does behind the scenes but it definitely takes a long time(my gut feeling is that it depends on the total number of midi items in the project, because as my project grows so does the time it takes to edit the midi items).

It should be easy to cache the required info because midi items can't change unless recorded or edited.

Also, gluing large midi items takes a quite a while, it should be quick though.

Anyways, hopefully this could be looked at. I don't know how to reproduce the issue without very large projects(hundreds of midi items and audio items and fx's).

This is just a guess, but it possibly is the midi sorting when editing. Are items sorted before and after? Maybe a better sort algorithm can be used? (no need to resort sorted items)

uncleswede · 10-24-2016, 01:17 AM

avocadomix · 10-24-2016, 03:34 AM

I don't have much experience with MIDI in Reaper, but 20 second wait may suggest that your virtual instruments don't fit into the available RAM and so your computer is busy moving stuff onto and out of the disk (which is a process that can be quite slow). I'd suggest you monitor your RAM usage when you see this happening.

Airal · 10-24-2016, 12:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by avocadomix

I don't have much experience with MIDI in Reaper, but 20 second wait may suggest that your virtual instruments don't fit into the available RAM and so your computer is busy moving stuff onto and out of the disk (which is a process that can be quite slow). I'd suggest you monitor your RAM usage when you see this happening.

Even if this is the case, it is still a performance issue. I have 16GB 4GHz skylake machine using SSD's. It shouldn't be an issue. If it is, then reaper should reserve a little memory for the midi so this doesn't happen. Midi data is very small, probably even a 1MB cache would work and is only 1/1600% of the total memory.