On Wednesday 28 November 2007, Krzysztof Foltman wrote: [...] > I don't think it's a serious problem. Huge processing buffers are > not very useful in practice. [...]
Actually, they're directly harmful most of the time! For any graph with more than one plugin, and with plugins that use internal buffers of the I/O buffer size, large buffers means you'll get a gigantic cache footprint. It gets worse in "high" latency real time situations (games, media players etc), where you have other threads fighting for the cache as well. Obviously, this effect is less visible with non-trivial plugins - but even how many plugins in a "normal" graph are actually CPU bound? In my experience, the effect is very pronounced (several times higher CPU load with 512 samples/buffer than with 32) when using a bunch of sampleplayer voices (cubic interpolation + oversampling) and some simple effects. You have to do some pretty serious processing to go CPU bound on a modern PC... //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate .------- http://olofson.net - Games, SDL examples -------. | http://zeespace.net - 2.5D rendering engine | | http://audiality.org - Music/audio engine | | http://eel.olofson.net - Real time scripting | '-- http://www.reologica.se - Rheology instrumentation --' _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-dev