High Gui Cpu Usage When Editing Lots Of Automation Points

Not sure if this is a “bug report” topic.
I’ve noticed that I get a whole lot of CPU being eaten up when I have automation envelopes running.
This is especially heavy when using full resolution (256 ppl) settings. I get stutter and lag when drawing envelopes in this way and to play back is too heavy for my “ickle old pwocessow”.
This might be a GNOME or metacity problem. I’ll try again in lxde using latest beta.

Otherwise, no problems yet!! Well done guys! I have no excuse not to get that MPD 32 now!

This has been mentioned before.

@see: Draw Dense Automation = Fries Cpu

kickofighto: Could you give us an example song where we can see when exactly Renoise starts slowing down. How many points & envelopes are needed on your setup to slow down things?

But whatever we do, there will be a point where editing tons of automation points gets slow. We tried to make this as fast as possible already during the alpha, but well, maybe should spend even a bit more time with that, if that makes editing automation uncomfortable.

Please note that all this only is a GUI problem. Audio performance is not affected. When it is, then its, like you said above, more a problem of the window manager stealing the Audio thread’s resources.

Perhaps points on the higher integrity matrix fields should only be made visible whenever the zoomlevel is appropriate. (Only show points on the current grid level). If there are points on lower zoom levels, this could then be somehow marked (e.g.: points highlight yellow to indicate there are even points on a finer level in their region)

My thoughts exactly! Though I think a thin line, ie single pixels or approximated curve when zoomed out might be more intuitive, like the draw function in the sample editor for example. Does renoise actually draw every one of those points when the editor is zoomed out?

@Taktik: I’ll see if I can reproduce in lxde (openbox), metacity is known to be poor for CPU.

Ok so after trying to emulate what I did before it seems the main problem is while I draw points in at 1/256. This seems to be a little worse when snap to grid is on.
Running 16 envelopes at this resolution is fine (no noticable change to cpu usage from no envelopes)
once they have been drawn, it’s while I draw and copy and paste complex envelopes that I get a problem in metacity.

The problem is far less severe in openbox (lxde) but the behaviour of the mouse and point entry is still laggy when I use the mouse quickly. This only occurs while the pattern is rolling.

I think my previous problemmay have had more to do with DSP than anything else.

If I increase LPB at 80bpm past 10LPB I get a freeze, and renoise is no longer listed by Jack, have to stop and start Jack server to solve this.

The freeze does not occur if I gradually increase the LPB. If I stop and press play again with these settings I get this freeze though.

Actually the freeze is due to client timeout time in Jack. Sorry!

So at the moment running 8 tracks with 16 1/256 resolution envelopes controlling vol and pan and all the parameters on one reverb at 80bpm 30lpb is quite tolerable => CPU at ~40%.

This is actually fine for me, personnally!