Hi,

I'm seeing a performance issue with Microtonic 3.3 and Ableton Live 10 (latest release) which is causing the Live UI to occasionally freeze. The more instances of Microtonic you add the more often the freezing happens. I notice this since I'm using many instances of Microtonic individually in drum racks, and adding a few tracks of these drum racks is causing the UI to be frozen most of the time.

I checked with Microtonic 3.2 and can confirm this doesn't have the same problem, no UI freezing with many instances.

Which OS is this under? Do you have multiple Microtonic windows open or just one at a time?

Mac OS 10.14.6

This is without the Microtonic window displayed. The test I did was just to create a rack with 16 Microtonic instances. Then duplicate the track with the rack.

For me the Live display is freezing for longer the more Microtonic instances are loaded.

If it’s useful I can record a video?

How many instances are we talking about here?

Our plugins run certain housekeeping routines on timer in the host's GUI thread. If we are talking about 50 to 100 instances in total I am sure this could add up to ... trouble.

I must admit that this is not a use case scenario that we have built Microtonic for. If Microtonic 3.2 happened to work better I guess we were just more lucky there. I usually never stress test with more than perhaps 30 instances.

But I'll look into it anyhow.

An option to creating so many instances for drum racks is to use a single instance of the multi-out version and route midi and audio to the different drum channels. I made a video about this a long long time ago:

That cuts down the number of required instances by a factor of eight. I am sure it eases the pressure on Live in many different ways (memory etc).

I've investigated this, and you are correct, the "housekeeping routine" in 3.3 has become much heavier on the cpu than in 3.2. When all Microtonic instances are created simultaneously (as when you duplicate a rack with lots of Microtonics in it) they will all run this routine on the exact same moment (once every second) and that is why the UI starts to stagger. On my computer I begin noticing it around 50 instances.

Thanks for discovering this. I will try to make this code more efficient and spread out the toll on the CPU.

Hi Magnus,

thanks for the reply. On my machine (Macbook Pro late 2016) I can see Live start dropping frames from around 20 instances of Microtonic 3.3 in the set. With 3.2 it's fine with 100 instances.

Thanks for the multi out suggestion but my use case is treating the Microtonic instances as a single channel drum synth (to allow them to be individually exposed to Ableton Push), so this won't be an option for me unfortunately.

I'm happy to continue using 3.2 since I'm only using the drum synth aspect of the plugin, but was worried some future host or Mac OS update will require the update.

Reviving this old topic. We have released a minor upgrade that ought to fix this problem. https://soniccharge.com/forum/topic/1744-autumn-update

Ah fantastic! Can't see any slowdown now with 64 instances.

Thanks so much for the fix!