Cantabile Development Blog

More Multiprocessor Work

Cantabile's multiple processor support is now working pretty well.

I think all the crashes and dead-locks on Cantabile's side of things seem to be sorted, but I still need to do more testing.

The screen shot below shows Cantabile running 16 racks with a piano synth and impulse response reverb effect on each, burning about 80% on both CPU cores. Cantabile 1.2 only copes with about 8 of these racks.

So that's all well and good except for one small problem - not all plugins behave in this new environment. There's a couple of things I can do that improve this, but at a cost to performance with the worst case scenario pretty much degrading to no better than single-core.

At the moment I'm considering adding three modes of multi-core support: * Off - super safe and behaves the same as 1.2, * Normal - a safer but less performant mode * Aggressive - best performance but at the risk of problems arising.

The other possibility is to provide a setting on each plugin that specifies whether to run it in aggressive or normal mode.

Posted on May 29, 2007

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