As i have a dual-CPU system i can nicely show the hit it takes when heavy gui useage is impacting on the cpu without crashing the system or too quickly halting it .
Here is a test I done with a project with average amount of elements , like some audio tracks a few inserts and some VSTi (BTW: running completely on one CPU , so I'm quite sure the overhead that would normally be added by the task of scheduling between two or more processors in a multi-cpu environment can be left neglected and doesn't play a role into it) .
The graphic below show the cpu load (left: CPU 1, right CPU 2) when
a) first half:
having a project playing back (seq window maximized)
b) second half:
still playing back and having a plugin gui opened and moving it around the screen (it eventually spiked at some point visible near the end of the timeline, which caused my system to freeze)
What one can see , is that it makes a MAJOR impact on cpu load and the question is if this is solvable or am I only trying to hunt a ghost ?
In a similar vein , wasn't there an option earlier that if the display settings are set to "don't show content of window when moving" it only shows the outline of moved windows ?
It doesn't work anymore , but it was a BIGTIME cpu saver !
but maybe there is really some space for optimizations ...