Hey hey,
I know Renoise can show you the CPU usage of VST instruments, but is there a way to show the CPU load of DSPs?
When Renoise is idle, (song stopped, nothing going on) I’m hitting about 12% CPU load on my Q6600 but I can’t find the naughty VST, all my instruments have been suspended so I know it’s not one of them.
+1
I suppose one could disable potentially offending effects to see if that moves the counter. I also wonder if OS load and load from other programs is counted too.
i’d say just disabeling plugins maybe won’t help, as you can switch their on/off state with pattern commands and such. so even when they’re off their cpu-usage has be taken into account by the system to prevent ‘cpu-hickups’ when they’re turned on again. i’m not sure about this but other programs (like ableton) behave like that.
so the safe way of finding the vst that clutters the system is to erase them from the dsp-chain one by one and see what happens.
btw i don’t think renoise measures os load and other programs. just what’s going on in renoise itself.
That’s simply not true as just a simple thing like playing more than one note (chords) causing CPU to go up loads and it’s not as if a DAW is going to assume you’re always using maximum polyphony and thus give you no space to breathe as soon as you load a VST even if you may only use one note from it once!
Thus don’t forget Auto-Suspend. What do you think that does.
(Aware first comment obviously applies to instruments, not effects.)
Not very practical for me at the moment, as my mixer looks like a control panel at CERN and I have about 36 tracks.
So toggling DSP effects to isolate them is going to be a PITA 
I do find that, even with the song idle, no sound, nothing going on, the CPU load is randomly high and it’s hard to even find the naughty plugin(s).
Granted, I have 36 tracks and probably over 80 plugins, some internal Renoise ones, most are VSTs. Not all tracks play at the same time but I’m using a lot of Send To tracks and multiple tracks per instrument (overhead mics and such).
It would be great if one could see the CPU load per track and per DSP.
well, i didn’t say Renoise always reserves the maximum amount of cpu a plugin could possibly reach, just that it won’t go to zero when nothing’s running. at least that’s what i experienced with various plugs. i could be wrong though and there’s another reason for this behavior. and yeah i know auto-suspend does exactly that (turning the dsp completely off) but it doesn’t work with all plugins, hence the option to disable auto-suspend.
anyway funkyspacecadets idea is spot on - i’d like to have a meter for cpu-usage of plugins as well. +1