so I got a report about high CPU usage of MVintageRotary on a MacBook Pro using Apple MainStage, so I started to investigate. And the findings are more than surprising.
Below are the details, but there's the story
I first tried to run the plugin on multiple computers. Mac OS X lost on every front compared to Windows, but even weirder was that Reaper was 50% faster than Logic and about 3x faster than MainStage!!!
So I thought, maybe it's the compiler or my code. So I did a benchmark of all the stuff from primitive floating point computations to complicated vector stuff, sorting etc. And guess what - Mac OS X won!
I was using MSVC 2005, so I thought, ok maybe that's really old now
. So I upgraded to MSVC 2012 and it indeed got faster, but nowhere to Mac OS X! Sadly I cannot check LLVM.Anyway so I start browsing and found a few benchmarks and indeed, single core computing on MacBook Pro i7 2.8GHz is faster even than my desktop PC i7 3.8GHz, but in practice the MacBook is close to unusable.
All benchmarks confirm it and I did quite a few, because I just couldn't believe the results. It's not the code, it's not the compiler, it's the OS and host. I was watching a few people working with Mac OS X and was pretty surprised they really do survive it's laziness
. Personally I hate it obviously, one has to wait all the time and stuff, but I was suspecting half of the problem is the HW. But not, the hardware is actually really fast!So how did Apple manage to convert such a good hardware into something so slow??
Any ideas? I think the whole multithreading model on Mac OS X stolen from million years old unix could be the answer. But still...
How did I start testing in the beginning
In all hosts I created an empty project and start adding tracks with one instance of the plugin, I ensured all tracks are armed and playing. No GUI showed, so only processing took place. I used 44kHz sampling rate, 256 samples buffer size. Each track contained a simple short wave file or audio input in case of MainStage. Both systems are fully up to date, drivers and stuff of course... Both are working properly. ASUS is slightly newer, but the config is actually worse, which was confirmed by the benchmarks I didn't have that time. I only used 32-bit hosts. The plugin is using an exactly same code on both platforms, compiled using new LLVM on Mac, and more than 10 years old Microsoft VC on Windows (so another obvious advantage for Mac).
MacBook Pro i7 2.8GHz, 4GB DDR 1333GHz with Mac OS X Mavericks
These are the number of tracks I was able to create before the audio engine started choking (higher is better of course):
Reaper: 10
Logic 9: 7
MainStage 9: 3 !!!
ASUS ZenBook i7 2.4GHz, 4GB DDR 1333GHz with Windows 8
Personally I think Win 7 are better and faster than Win 8 (except for startup), but guess what:
Reaper: 31 !!!
Any logical conclusion???
Ok, so I always suspected Mac OS X is slow, but that much??? This makes the PC 3x faster than MacBook... The the HW is faster! This is just impossible...
And the differences between hosts on Mac??? I suspect, that MainStage isn't even able to use the multiple cores, because the system performance meter actually didn't show a high CPU use! In fact, when it started choking, it was showing 20%. So I assume MainStage is using just a single thread! Now is it really that amateuristic piece of junk from 1980ths or is it possible to enable it?? Logic apparently uses 2 threads (or it has extremely high overhead), maybe because the computer has 2 cores, but it has 4 logical CPUs, so it should use 4...
Is there someone, who can explain to me, what I did wrong or how is that even possible in a world, where Apple has the nerve to claim they produce the best OS on the market???... I'm just pissed right now...
