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First CPU core is spiking more than other cores


synkrotron

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Even reading this has me scratching my head:-

When enabled, SONAR will attempt to load balance FX Racks that contain two or more unbypassed plug-in effects, including track FX Racks, bus FX Racks, clip FX Racks, FX Chains, ProChannel FX Racks, and ProChannel FX Chains.

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2 minutes ago, pwalpwal said:

iirc before the load balancing feature, a single audio track would be processed on a single core, so all plugs on that track would also be processed on that core... the lb allows better distribution (in the diagram) but there are a couple of exceptions, like the master bus, and the gui...

Okay, thanks @pwalpwal

 

I came across this image on my hard disk a minute ago, taken back in 2013 when load balancing really was an issue LOL :D

Sonar%20Performance.png

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28 minutes ago, synkrotron said:

Hi again @Chuck E Baby :)

I had a look at this. It wasn't enable for some reason. Not sure if it made a big difference.

On the help page it shows this image:-

NewFeatures.017.1.png

Not sure what this means to be honest. Taking the image at face value it seems to suggest that if you have an FX bin with 8 effects, as show, they are distributed across the CPU cores, as show.

But what if each of your FX bins only has 1, 2 or 3 effects in them. Does that mean that they are only distributed across cores 1, 2, 3?

Or does it distribute effects across all the FX bins to each of the core. For example, say track 1 has 3 effects in the FX bin, track 2 has 3 effects in the track bin, will those effects be distributed across cores 1 to 6 in turn? Not sure if I put that across correctly.

I wonder if this is something that @Noel Borthwick could shed some light on, assuming no one else can?

 

cheers

andy :)

Plugin load balancing only applies if you have 2 or more plugins in a bin. And yes as the name implies it distributes the CPU load in parallel across multiple cores.
Each effects bin that has 2 or more plugins will be balanced this way and this includes all effects bins across tracks buses, prochannel as well as clip effects. 

Some caveats:

Plug-in load balancing makes the most difference when you have many ( more than 4-5) plugins in a bin and they are expensive to process. These are the cases where normally the load would bottleneck other serial processing of the track or bus. This can be the case when you have a complex mastering chain with many plugins on a single bus.

If the plugins require low CPU then load balancing won't help much and may actually consume more CPU since multiprocessing has overhead as well and the task switching cost may not be beneficial in this case.

Plug-in load balancing only kicks in when the buffer size is > 64 samples. Otherwise there would be no benefits.

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  • 11 months later...

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