RAM reflection

[JonOsterman]

Hi,

Working on my project, I had some thoughts about RAM optimization :

- Where would you put the average RAM consumption for a VST plugin ? Mine is around 20-30Mb under FL Studio (so 80-90 if I include FL)

- When I close my plugin (VST3 for example) the RAM consumption doesn't back down, is there a way to free/delete things ? Putting them in Destructor doesn't seems to work

[Tale]

In general the best place to allocate RAM is in your constructor, and the free in your detructor. However, sometimes you will need to know the max. block size, so you might want to (re)allocate in Reset(). You should try really hard to prevent allocations in ProcessDoubleReplacing(), as this could result in audio dropouts.

Now, most RAM usage will likely come from your GUI (image resources). If so, then your constuctor will indeed not free them, because they are static (i.e shared among instances).

That being said, REAPER has the option to fully unload VST plug-ins, which does free shared memory after the last instance is removed. However, I don't know if this also applies to VST3.

[Xenakios]

Originally Posted by Tale

That being said, REAPER has the option to fully unload VST plug-ins, which does free shared memory after the last instance is removed.

Assuming the plugin actually does free up all its allocated memory. Just unloading a DLL from the outside (by the host) does not automatically free the memory allocated by that DLL.

[JonOsterman]

Ok so there is some allocated data that I can't free, thanks