Loading time tips

[Father]

When there is lots of fonts installed, using 'System Fonts' is really going to increase the loading time for the plugin.

[Exo]

After putting some hours into this, i came to some conclusions:
1: Do not use "system fonts" module in your schematics!
2: Ruby bitmap is slower on load.
3: Drawing lots of shapes is not recommended. Use bitmap if possible.

Yes I had forgot about system fonts, you will notice that it is not used in any default modules in Flowstone anymore (it used to be used a lot).

Back in the dark ages synthmaker had a serious problem with load times some people where reporting 20-60 seconds load times, this gave SM a really bad name and the problem was system fonts the more fonts you had the longer the load time. Took a long time for anyone to figure out it was that causing it. I think the slowness mostly comes from filling the property index selector. Malc fixed some inefficiencies in that component that improved load times but obviously listing the entire font collection of a user every load is clearly a bad idea.

[tester]

Ah, you mean listing fonts.
I thought you speak about using them for labels.

[trogluddite]

Well, for "fixed" labels, it saves CPU to make labels part of a "panel background" bitmap if you can.
Characters are pretty much just vector graphics, and just as with vector drawing, they make GDI work a lot harder when refreshing the screen. It basically has to take the character shapes and 'rasterize' them into a bitmap for every single re-draw, which means a lot of bezier curve calculations etc. to work out which pixels should be painted. For a bitmap (at its natural size, and aligned with pixels), it's pretty much just a simple memory copy operation - so called "blitting".

I agree with what you said previously, though - there is also the matter of taste. I don't sell my stuff, and I don't find a few seconds loading time offensive (takes me ten minutes to find my last remaining guitar pick, anyway!). So I tend to "optimise" for run-time performance and ease of maintenance. That's a balance that we all have to strike in our own way. I think it's always wise to consider the 'run-time' CPU effects whenever considering a load-time optimisation, though - half a second less loading is not worth audio crackles every time a fancy display updates!

[Father]

Well, for "fixed" labels, it saves CPU to make labels part of a "panel background" bitmap if you can.

True. But if you have few tabs in your design, how would you do it? Texts or separated bitmaps for each tab?

I agree with what you said previously, though - there is also the matter of taste. I don't sell my stuff, and I don't find a few seconds loading time offensive (takes me ten minutes to find my last remaining guitar pick, anyway!).!

haha those sneaky picks!
If the plugin takes 3 seconds to load, and you have it on 10 tracks, then it takes 30 seconds to load the project, i rather loose all my picks!
some huge plugins almost load instantly and that's awesome. however i was experimenting with different DAWs and some of them are loading faster than the others. For my project, the reaper was faster than the FL. I'm not sure but looks like vector texts are looking a bit different in each of them.

[trogluddite]

If the plugin takes 3 seconds to load, and you have it on 10 tracks, then it takes 30 seconds to load the project,

Guess I'm just showing my age!
My first studio PC was a Ist generation Pentium with a 200MHz processor (VST synths didn't even exist yet), and before that, manually linking hardware on a patchbay and hand setting all of the mixer channels from a chart! 30secs to set up a whole project is still 'magic' to me!

True. But if you have few tabs in your design, how would you do it? Texts or separated bitmaps for each tab?

That depends a lot on the way that tabs are used. For example, sometimes that contents stay the same - like having tabs for multiple oscillators - in which case a lot of the background can be shared, and I'll just make small bitmaps for the top tab selectors in selected/not-selected styles. But if the tabs are all for very different things, that's not always practical.

DAWs and some of them are loading faster

Depends a lot on how the DAW uses multi-threading - some have all of the audio and plugins on the same thread, whereas other can share the channels around processor cores. That will also be affected by how much of the loading time is HDD access (can't be done in 'parallel' if plugin are on the same HDD) and how much is 'set-up' time (which might be 'parallel).

[Father]

My first studio PC was a Ist generation Pentium with a 200MHz processor (VST synths didn't even exist yet), and before that, manually linking hardware on a patchbay and hand setting all of the mixer channels from a chart! 30secs to set up a whole project is still 'magic' to me!

I guess satisfaction is not in our nature. We always want everything to run faster. But like you said its magical compared to other fields like motion graphics and 3d stuff. Doesn't mean we should stop improving our products to its best.

[trogluddite]

Doesn't mean we should stop improving our products to its best.

Definitely so - and everything learned along the way makes us more capable programmers.