Track selection and plugins Slow GUI

[srdmusic]

After doing some extensive research I've concluded that tracks selection become increasing slow with larger templates and sessions with multiple levels of folder tracks.

TEST 1:

Create a session with 10 tracks and select around each track. The tracks select and arm or auto arm very quickly. The plugins windows and FX chain windows pop up very quickly.

TEST 2:

Create a session with many tracks (1000 to start) Track selection is more cumbersome. FX windows pop up much slower. With multiple levels of folder tracks, the track selection and fx windows take upto 3 seconds to refresh the GUI.

Is there a way to have the GUI refresh quicker?

Another user found more problem with very high track counts:
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....ght=4000+track

[foxAsteria]

Excessive tracks won't cause this by itself. If you have 1000 tracks, you can't expect to run plugins on every one unless you have a very powerful system. You can get the GUI to refresh faster, yes, but only at the expense of actual audio processing. The GUI lags by default when the system is overtaxed because it's less critical than the audio.

I can't imagine you have the time to deal with different fx chains on 1000 tracks, so you should figure out which ones have the same fx chains and use a single fx track to send them all to instead of an fx chain on each track.

In the theme tweaker there are various settings to degrade visual quality in favor of performance (fill mode). You can also check the performance meter window to see what's using computer power and how much. You can disable Windows theming if you're on Windows for a little performance gain or force your plugins to use the barebones Reaper UI.

Basically you need to take a different approach to computer resource management or upgrade it, as it's clearly overburdened.

[srdmusic]

Originally Posted by foxAsteria

Excessive tracks won't cause this by itself. If you have 1000 tracks, you can't expect to run plugins on every one unless you have a very powerful system. You can get the GUI to refresh faster, yes, but only at the expense of actual audio processing. The GUI lags by default when the system is overtaxed because it's less critical than the audio.

I can't imagine you have the time to deal with different fx chains on 1000 tracks, so you should figure out which ones have the same fx chains and use a single fx track to send them all to instead of an fx chain on each track.

In the theme tweaker there are various settings to degrade visual quality in favor of performance (fill mode). You can also check the performance meter window to see what's using computer power and how much. You can disable Windows theming if you're on Windows for a little performance gain or force your plugins to use the barebones Reaper UI.

Basically you need to take a different approach to computer resource management or upgrade it, as it's clearly overburdened.

Good suggestions all around. Can you go into more detail about the theme tweaker fill mode? I use a custom theme but I've seen the same problem exist with the default 5.0 and 4.0 theme.

As far as upgrading my system, I'm not sure there is much more that I can go up. My current system is a Dual 24 core (48 core totaal) 3.1GHz XEON server with 128GB ram and 14x500GB Hardware RAIDed Sample and project drives. If my system can't handle the track count than most users who don't have as powerful a system will see even worse results.

My current template has 950 tracks. Most of the tracks have a single kontakt instrument on them. All of tracks in my template are disabled, fx offline and muted accept the busses and master out. The way I work is that when I want to use a track, I active it's plugins and unmute the track. I believe Reaper should give us an option to fully disable processing on muted or empty tracks.

I've been experimenting with toggling 'prevent media buffering and anticipatory fx on selected tracks' in my template. When I select the 'prevent options' I get about 10% of my CPU usage back at Idle. My system idles at 44% CPU at a buffer setting of 1024.

Any other suggestions?

[srdmusic]

Check out this post as well. Similar findings:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....edia+buffering

[foxAsteria]

Well I agree that system is ridiculously OP, but why do you need 950 instances of Kontakt? You could easily reduce the load by x16 if you simply use all the MIDI channels (one for each of instruments on each instance).

As far as the Theme Tweaks stuff, just open it up and have a look. You'll see options for fill mode in various places and it will tell you which modes are more/less intensive.

There is an option for disabling CPU on muted tracks: preferences>audio>mute/solo

Again, I must strongly advise you rethink your strategy from the ground up. That many tracks is bound to be cumbersome to work with. Consider freezing tracks that you no longer need to adjust, or break your template down into more manageable chunks, so that you increase the track count only as necessary.

Maybe try the free tool Resource Hacker to get a better idea of what's consuming resources.

[srdmusic]

Another thread confirming similar findings:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....ge+track+count

With 5000 tracks it takes 15 seconds to select a track.

[Lokasenna]

1. Why do you need three threads for this?

2. As a workaround, try using the Track Manager to hide all of the unused tracks from the Track and Mixer panels - on my system this cut the CPU usage for 1000 tracks by about two thirds. You can Solo and Mute from the Track Manager (right-click the column headings to add them as columns), and then make the tracks you want to use visible when you're done auditioning.

[srdmusic]

Originally Posted by Lokasenna

1. Why do you need three threads for this?

2. As a workaround, try using the Track Manager to hide all of the unused tracks from the Track and Mixer panels - on my system this cut the CPU usage for 1000 tracks by about two thirds. You can Solo and Mute from the Track Manager (right-click the column headings to add them as columns), and then make the tracks you want to use visible when you're done auditioning.

1. I moved one of the posts into two threads on the bug forum since. I split the posts into two parts. One is CPU related the other is GPU/ GUI related.

2. That's a good work around as far as track selection is concerned. I have track view presets that narrow down the tracks to sections. I also use a hide unused tracks script that helps.

In other DAWs, Cubase, DP and etc, we don't see the same GUI refresh problems with high track counts. I know that Reaper prioritized the audio threads above the GUI threads by design. I wonder if its possible to give the users some control over this priority for systems that have really powerful CPU's and GPU's

[mucknog]

Has anyone been able to solve the issue.
I got a rather large template ~900 tracks and the track selection time is really getting on my nerves.

I started a Thread in the bug report section fro this:
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2674612

maybe you could chime in over there.
Cheers