Plug-in Hygiene (when are they using resources?)

[Starship Krupa]

Partially in the interest of extending the life of my aging 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad DAW system, and partially out of plain curiosity, I am trying to figure out when FX and Virtual Instruments are still active from a processor and memory use standpoint.

I often find myself when deep in a mix, having tracks that go muted for a long time waiting to be brought back in, takes that I plan on using for comping, etc. I want to know how to really "park" them so that they are not dragging down the rest of the project in some way. Some of these are audio, like vocal and drum tracks with plenty of processing, and some are VSTi's, like string sample players that use a lot of RAM.

I'm talking about VST2's here, because it looks like VST3's have ways to unload themselves when they are not processing audio.

So far I am pretty sure that both FX and VSTi's are still fully in memory and in the case of the FX at least, doing their work even when their track is muted or there is silence on the track.

From within the Effect List window, so far it looks like if you uncheck the box next to the word "Effect," all plug-ins go inactive for that track and give back their resources. I may be wrong.

Where I am less certain is whether muting the individual FX in the list releases their resources.

Also, in a chain of FX, does the signal still have to go "through" a muted version of the plug? Or is it routed "around" it?

Regarding VSTi's, I think that they are still in memory, with all of their samples and whatnot loaded whether their track is muted or not. I am also again unsure whether unchecking an instrument in the Instrument window does anything to relieve this.

[aquataur]

When I still had my 32bit machine, memory was at its limits when using samplers like EZD. I observed that memory does not get released when unloading plug-ins or upon freezing.

I requested that feature, but as of now (end of V.7 development) this does not seem to have changed.
With 64 bits and oodles of memory it probably is not that crucial any longer, howerver programmers seem to ever get sloppier in memory mangement due to the availability of cheap memory.

Look at the following memory numbers I staged. I took memory snapshots before, after opening MX7, after importing EZD2 and a project (MIDI directly imported into the MX track), freezing, unloading equal to new project, closing MX7.
EZD2 seems to consume a whopping good 1GB of memory (too much for a 32 bit system...), which does not get down when you freeze the track.

Note that some numbers never go down again (standby memory), but this may be a operating system peculiarity.
With the mills going slowly and more important things to fix this appears to have remained the same it ever was.

-helmut

[chibear]

I can see the RAM issue with totally unloading plugins as you mute them, you would then have to wait for the plugin to load again each time you re-activated them, but I think the OP is referring more to CPU usage and how Mixcraft routs around muted plugins. Watching this one

[Starship Krupa]

I requested that feature, but as of now (end of V.7 development) this does not seem to have changed.
With 64 bits and oodles of memory it probably is not that crucial any longer, howerver programmers seem to ever get sloppier in memory mangement due to the availability of cheap memory.

Bit of insight from my days as a pro software QA engineer:

Resource creep can be exacerbated in smaller companies without dedicated QA departments to maintain a collection of "minimal" systems.

Devs obviously have up-to-date, even perhaps extra-capable systems for the work they do, so issues of resource scarcity are just not as in-their-face as they might otherwise be.

I am good at system tuning, I often use Process Lasso when mixing to bump my audio apps and drivers in priority, as well as to kill unnecessary processes.

The advertised system requirements for Mixcraft 7 are:

"1 GB RAM (2 GB or more recommended) 1.5 GHz CPU (Dual Core or higher recommended)"

I don't even try it any more on my old Pentium D system. Can't imagine trying to do much of anything on a single-core box with 1G of RAM. Heck, I would not like to have to browse the web and do word processing with such a system!

Maybe doing stuff with only MIDI and the supplied loops and plug-ins would work, but I'd not like to have to try.

[Acoustica Greg]

Hi,

There's RAM usage, but there's also CPU usage. Performance problems are often caused by bottlenecks in CPU processing. Muting the track seems to free up CPU processing, and of course freezing would do that as well.

In regard to RAM, I'm not sure what it would take to change the RAM footprint as the program was running, but RAM is cheap these days and most people with relatively new computers have plenty.

Greg