(Linux) Repro-5 takes a lot of CPU

[mevla]

Hello,

I have a Bitwig session in the works. It is currently stopped, nothing is playing. There are 3 Bazille, 1 Zebra, 1 Diva, 2 Waverazor and 1 Repro-5. The 'top' utility shows Repro-5 taking 13% CPU. Zebra takes 2% and the rest of the synths 1% each.

Something's wrong with Repro-5 ?

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Based on your Diva settings, and what it's doing musically, that CPU usage doesn't sound completely unreasonable. RePro-5 uses a LOT of CPU due to the high degree of modeling involved. Urs has said that RePro-5 is basically even higher in quality than Diva in Divine mode, so using RePro-5 for polyphonic pads with long releases can really bog down a CPU very quickly. Sometimes the MCore button (turns on Multicore CPU usage) helps, other times, it may not. Experiment with that. Additionally, you can look to print/bounce/freeze your RePro-5 tracks to audio. The high CPU usage is the tradeoff for this level of quality.

[EvilDragon]

Repro-5 doesn't take CPU when nothing is playing, though... At least not over here. That's the issue OP is talking about. This might be down to how Bitwig handles plugins...

[daily patcher]

Try turning off plugin sandboxing in Bitwig and see if that helps.

[mevla]

Try turning off plugin sandboxing in Bitwig and see if that helps.

Not by so much. Went down to about 9-10%, still when idling (while no tracks being played by Bitwig). This is release 6821.

[ejgallego]

VST2 or VST3? Can you try Bigwig Beta 2.3 and the 7015 build? [Note, these are both unsuitable for production use]

[ejgallego]

Suspending works fine for me in Repro 7015 VST3 + BW 2.3beta4. Note however that if the UI of the plugin is shown [even in minimized form] that will prevent BW from suspending audio processing.

Just fold the VST [or switch to another track, move to some other panel] and you should be good.

[tenchudj]

funny, i think my alsa/jack amd bulldozer onboard sound on debian stretch
holds up very good compared to
i7 win7 asio firewire

but i'm using airwaves and the windows vsts on Linux, since there was no difference to the linux ports

[mevla]

VST2 or VST3? Can you try Bigwig Beta 2.3 and the 7015 build? [Note, these are both unsuitable for production use]

I will try at the 2.3 release, which should be soon. I hope they worked a little on the Linux side of things.

[mevla]

I have tried now with beta 5, It might be even worse. I have 7 tracks in a test session. 1 Dark Zebra, 1 Biotek, 1 Vertigo, 1 Repro-5 and three Phase-4. There's some MIDI notes for each, nothing much, just testing. With Bitwig stopped, top shows around 14% CPU use by Repro-5.

top is used with the scanning being done each second (s 1 command)

A second Repro-5 loaded shows around 7% CPU use while the first maintains 14%.

Interestingly enough a 3rd Repro-5 shows 0.2 % CPU use. All Repro-5 have a factory orchestral pad patch loaded. Same with a fourth one.

That's when nothing is being played. When a 3-note chord are played on the Repro-5 instances (extract from top) :

Code: Select all

 CPU%
 33.3  BitwigStudioEng                                
 24.6  ZebraHZ                                        
 24.4  Repro-5                                        
 21.6  Repro-5                                        
 18.2  Repro-5                                        
 16.6  Repro-5                                        
 15.2  BitwigStudio                                   
 13.0  Web Content (the KVR message page)
  9.2  BioTek
  3.2  firefox
  2.4  Vertigo                                                                             

If 11 to 13%, the approx. CPU use when idle less some actual footprint, could be subtracted from this...

[ejgallego]

Again, are you displaying the Repro-5 widget on Bitwig? If the sliders are shown the plugin has to be kept active [as of today].

[mevla]

Again, are you displaying the Repro-5 widget on Bitwig? If the sliders are shown the plugin has to be kept active [as of today].

The terminal showing top (and emacs for formatting the text lines before pasting them here) were on another desktop than the Bitwig application. So not even Bitwig is showing when the top readings were taken, much less any plugins. Moreover, as a rule, as soon as a plugin's controls are not used actively the plugin is put away. I only have a 1600x1200 screen so there's no way at all to pile them up and keep doing anything useful.

When I 'get rid' of a plugin being shown by Bitwig, I always click on the X top right for that plugin window. I do not know what a minimized plugin looks like in Bitwig.

And last, the CPU consumption readings shown above, being all in the same excessive range, would mean that all Repro-5 instances UI were actively being shown at that moment. Which is squarely an impossibility because it does not make any practical sense at all to do so. So no, none of the Repro-5, or any other synth or plugin in that session were shown, and Bitwig itself was not being shown.

The top reading shown above in the code section was taken when Bitwig was playing the tracks. Which means that the tracks containing Repro-5 were not made inactive by any means, and all plugin UIs were not shown. Then the destop was switched to the one containing emacs and the terminal.

[ejgallego]

Interesting, by "shown" I mean that the Repro-5 box is in the device window, not collapsed. But indeed I have been doing some tests and the sleep behavior is not fully consistent. All that I can say is that indeed Repro-5 is put to sleep sometimes.

[Raddler1]

Has any of the new Repro5 updates reduced the cpu?

[EvilDragon]

I don't think that's up to the plugin, it looks more to be a Bitwig thing.