Ableton Forum

Just a quick question here.. i opened up my cpu monitor, just to see how much of the cpu is being used by live vs. other programs (ie reason)..

as a standalone with nothing attached, reason fluxuates between 5 and 11 percent..

as a standalone with nothing attached, live fluxuates between 65 to 87 percent...(but shows 6-7 on its own cpu monitor)...WOW!

is this right?

so to be on the safe side.. i added a mixer, a malstrom synth, and a matrix sequencer... .. still about 15 percent.. so i opened a demo song up.. sitting w/o output still way below at 36%.. playing with multiple sources does bring it up to about 75 tho...

live on the otherhand even with allot of samples playing... it stays between 65 to 87...

so comes my questions.. is the osx monitor correct? why does the cpu monitor on live only show a small part of what it is actually using? is there a way to reduce the cpu load? i also have a gig of memory just lying in my powerbook.. anyway to use it to help process live's actions in osx?(unlike os9, i believe there is no way to allocate memory in osx.. i think)


Neil

(One more thing about the up comming jaguar, personally i dont think that jaguar will really improve the quality/use if lives is a big cpu eater, altho i do believe that software companies like ableton will be able to utilize the operating system more efficently)

as a side note, i'm not sure how more effiecient jagwire will be for audio users, however I do know that it does offload a lot more of the graphics to the GPU, so that will possibly help, by freeing up some of the CPU.

Also, one of the Ableton team told me that displaying the live graphics on screen in OS X takes quite a bit of it's measurable CPU time. Again, Jagwire may help here.

I'm happy for audio programs to get as much CPU time as they want so they don't break any sound.

A great question! For now, Ableton seems to be (is) saying its not economical to develop optimization for Altivec. I dimly remember Gerhardt saying something like LIVE runs "on top of" OSX, whatever that means. This was why LIVE was the first sequencer ready for OSX. So the CPU usage you see may be LIVE running on top.

Reason has been solid for me. Maybe I'm not hardcore, but I can't get much more than 20% CPU usage out of it with a drum kit and a few synths firing away...

Aren't all or most the GUI elements in Live just TIFF widgets? I also wonder if Live is carbonized, and not a Cocoa application, so that development costs would be lower, and if legacy code is hurting speed...

Man, I'm craving some performance improvements in Live. I love it, but the overall quality seems crippled by the way it does I/O and by the way it eats CPU. It just doesn't seem dependable for live or studio work on what would in all other cases be considered a very fast Mac.

In my experience, OS X and Live do not seem to mix well at this time, sadly. Hopefully, the GM of Jaguar will provide a starting point for improvements on this end...

-Alex

I must say that as much as I love LIVE, and Ableton's general ethic, I find myself ALWAYS mentioning this performance difference when people ask me what I'm using after my shows. I am pretty uncomfortable giving a wholehearted recommendation of LIVE to Mac Users becasue of this. I can can see not fixing this until version 2.0, but providing a vastly different performance level for a supposedly cross-platform product seems a bit wrong. Its not as though people do not use Macs for live performance. I am well aware of what a small percentage of the computer market mac users are, but in my microcosmos, the SF music scene I have never, let me repeat NEVER seen a PC laptop in a performance setting. With Mac OS 10.2 you are handed arguably the best audio and midi operating system available. What are you going to do with it Ableton?
Again, I applaud Ableton's ethic of constant free updates and addressing user problems. I would hope that you, Ableton, consider this issue when designing your next overhaul. Thanks.

here here.