Mulab's CPU efficiency ...

[Michael L]

Out of curiosity, I loaded mda e-piano in MuLab on my old 2-core 2.66 i7 MBP running OSX and it almost hit 1% on the OSX Activity Monitor, even playing chords. That's good enough for me.

[Zexila]

Out of curiosity, I loaded mda e-piano in MuLab on my old 2-core 2.66 i7 MBP running OSX and it almost hit 1% on the OSX Activity Monitor, even playing chords. That's good enough for me.

Got 16.5% in idle without anything loaded on my 2.0ghz late 2006 MacBook

[Nielzie]

fluffy_little_something, do not spent time for all that discussions here, it is waste of time.
There is more friendly forums and apps. Sorry but this conclusion I made being here for a week I never see that developers talked this way with newcomers that come to try its app. The only thing I get from this forum is that I am noob that telling absurd See you guys ma be after another year

Can't seem to see where things went downhill here, Jo is awesome and this place is really friendly, community too, you get response quite fast and from the man himself, others are super friendly which is rare on KVR.

+1

[Nielzie]

fluffy_little_something, do not spent time for all that discussions here, it is waste of time.
There is more friendly forums and apps. Sorry but this conclusion I made being here for a week I never see that developers talked this way with newcomers that come to try its app. The only thing I get from this forum is that I am noob that telling absurd See you guys ma be after another year

I don't think the dev is being unreasonable here though, in fact he's being pretty receptive to the question, and gave some interesting and unbiased informations on the topic.

+1

[Nielzie]

Out of curiosity, I loaded mda e-piano in MuLab on my old 2-core 2.66 i7 MBP running OSX and it almost hit 1% on the OSX Activity Monitor, even playing chords. That's good enough for me.

Got 16.5% in idle without anything loaded on my 2.0ghz late 2006 MacBook

That's really high and I can't imagine it has something to do with either the mda e-piano or MuLab, especially when idle.. I'm a Windows OS user though, but even with that in mind.. that's extraordinary high.

[pljones]

OK, I ran another test - more "real world" if you like. This is my usual drumming set up. I like being able to switch quickly between kits to match the style of a jam, so having lots of tracks with all the effects loaded is idea. I switch off the t/racks I'm not using -- so only one track was enable for processing in both Reaper and MuLab for this. I set up a MIDI loop on a separate track and routed it to the enabled t/rack. (This was recorded "real time" in Reaper from my MIDI keyboard rather than my usual TrapKAT.)

First: Reaper, 60 Kontakt drum kits loaded on separate tracks inside MUX 7.0.26, with mda compressor and limiter, loop playing one of the tracks

Code: Select all

CPU

	AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor 
...
	Utilisation	22% (between 18% and 26%, spread pretty evenly across eight cores)
	Speed	3.92 GHz
	Up time	0:01:17:18
	Processes	69
	Threads	1077
	Handles	31275

Memory

	32.0 GB DDR3
...
	Available	2.8 GB
	Cached	1.5 GB
	Committed	32.9/96.0 GB
	Paged pool	308 MB
	Non-paged pool	163 MB
	In use	29.1 GB

Next, MuLab 7.0.28, same Kontakt and mda stuff loaded (it's the same lot of MuX presets, in fact), same loop playing (exported from Reaper, loaded into MuLab) into one of the racks:

Code: Select all

CPU

	AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor
...
	Utilisation	9% (varied from 8% to 9% a little but pretty rock solid; I've left MuLab at "Auto(4)" for Audio Processor Threads)
	Speed	3.92 GHz
	Up time	0:01:33:10
	Processes	70
	Threads	1094
	Handles	31565

Memory

	32.0 GB DDR3
...
	Available	3.3 GB
	Cached	2.1 GB
	Committed	30.3/96.0 GB
	Paged pool	357 MB
	Non-paged pool	146 MB
	In use	28.5 GB

[fluffy_little_something]

Your mentioning that you have limited the number of threads to 4 gave me an idea. I manually limited the number of threads to 1 and played the fattest chords, overlapping even. And bingo, only one core was shown really occupied (about 80%), the overall CPU occupation varied between 15 and 23 in the resource manager and in a similar fashion as with Mixcraft. It seems that there is a communication problem between Mulab and Windows so that inaccurate levels are displayed in the resource manager when I use more cores.

Just noticed that Mulab's own CPU meter corresponds very well to the occupation of that single core, the first orange bars became visible...

I gradually increased the number of cores, and Mulab's meter kept showing the same taxation. But in the resource manager the usage kept increasing accordingly, up to 65% for the overall CPU, with the individual cores showing similar levels when I had all 6 cores enabled again.

[MuTools]

Two additional notes:

1) Note that if your cpu is using hyper-threaded cores, then be sure to have read this doc page:
http://www.mutools.com/galaxa/docs/mula ... setup.html

2) When you're using less cores than what is set in MuLab's Audio Setup, then the system's cpu usage value will indeed give a higher value as what you might expect because when MuLab's multi audio threads are unused they do consume some cpu. Lets call this virtual cpu usage. This is no prob at all wrt making music, there is nothing lost because as soon as you add some extra sounds / effects all cores will be working fulltime. So wrt measurement in very low stress situations the system's cpu usage value for MuLab will be misleading as it counts that virtual cpu usage too, but when really making music then all cores will be used and so there will be no virtual cpu usage.
Conclusion: The more you make music, the better!

[fluffy_little_something]

No, there is no hyperthreading involved, my processor has 6 real cores.
There is definitely a problem, I just don't know whether it is on Mulab's or W7's side...

[MuTools]

No, there is no hyperthreading involved, my processor has 6 real cores.

Ok, that's good!
Real cores are much much better than hyper-threaded cores.

There is definitely a problem, I just don't know whether it is on Mulab's or W7's side...

Did you read & understand my explanation?

[fluffy_little_something]

I am not sure because it would be so absurd. If I understood it correctly, it is a silly system, frankly, because it is useless as it doesn't show me how much capacity I still have left. Mulab making it seem as though all cores are equally and heavily taxed simply hides real usage in the resource manager. I could be using 20% or 50% or 80% of my CPU, I couldn't tell...

Why do other DAW's manage to enable the resource manager to show correct values?

[MuTools]

I don't care about some 'correct values' in the resource manager, i do care about making music. We seem to have 2 different goals.

[fluffy_little_something]

A really weird attitude for a programmer...
Having an AMD processor instead of an i7 or Xeon, I do have to plan how many tracks I can use, which instruments I can use etc. That is why I want and need to know what is going on in terms of CPU usage...

[chk071]

Why do other DAW's manage to enable the resource manager to show correct values?

I don't think they do really. It has always been recommended here and elsewhere to use the task manager as a measuring tool for CPU load.

[pljones]

A really weird attitude for a programmer...

What, wanting their software to do what their software is meant to do as well as it can? Or do you think that displaying numbers in Windows Resource Manager is what the software intended for? That seems like a weird attitude for someone wanting to make music.