SynthMaker

dll Memory allocation

Archive · 2011 3 old posts

From the original SynthMaker forum (2004–2014), with its members’ names and dates.

stw ·

While ckecking my new plug for any issues i found out that it's a huge memory hog which seems to depend very much on graphic elements. My dll has a filesize of app. 3MB which blows up to a 90MB monster if used in a VST host. Removing all audio part shows the biggest part of that are the GUI elements which take 60MB alone. My main concern is about app. 40 knobs/faders all between 5k-20k .png which explode to 40MB. And that is with only one loaded source of about 8 different knobs connected to multiple targets.

Does anyone know a reason or better a solution how to avoid that? I guess i've to put my project on halt until i can fix this. This is absolutely inacceptable for a user if compareable plugs occupy less than a 1/5 of that ! 😠 So it's somehow urgent.... 😕

infuzion ·

Are those 40 different knobs/sliders, or 2 knobs & 1 slider repeated? Tried using 1 master Bitmap primitive per unique graphic, & connect with knobs via wireless? Also, SM may use graphics uncompressed. Try to test by exporting as .BMP.

trogluddite ·

Yes, I've seen the same thing with my Loopa schematic - most knobs in there are 'unique' so it gets very large. My guess is that the Bitmap primitives de-compress the whole bitmap strip at load time, Most knobs would have only a few colours, repeating patterns, and possibly lots of transparent parts - so in theory would compress very efficiently - i.e. a big difference between compressed and uncompressed versions of the same image.

If you have Photoshop or similar, maybe take a look at your bitmaps in there - you should be able to get some 'image info' to see the uncompressed size, and compare to the amount of 'inflating' in your plugin.

Possibly 'load-time de-compression' would make extracting the individual frames faster/simpler, I'm not really sure. But it is frustrating nonetheless.

Can't really offer much in the way of suggestions - just obvious stuff like smaller knobs/less frames etc. - but maybe they would ruin the nice look and feel of your GUI.

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