Anyone else find this 2.2.1 release more CPU hungry? A patch I was playing perfectly OK yesterday (albeit at a fairly consistent 91-95% CPU utilisation), is now showing OVERs at regular intervals. Updated to this new firmware this morning. Nothing else has changed.
Strangely, after leaving it a couple of days and rebooting a couple of times, the CPU utilisation has gone back to where it was, so the patch is now playable again?! Any ideas what else could cause a patch to intermittently utilise more CPU with no apparent changes?
The amount of CPU a module uses depends (among other things) on how much modulation it’s receiving — and fast modulation requires more calculations than slow modulation. So a little spike to the rate of an LFO, or a coincidence where two or more variable-rate modulation sources happened to be going fast at the same time, could easily nudge a patch from 95% to 99%.
There’s also the dynamic load balancing that happens in patches with 3 or more modules. When you load and play a patch (or add or remove a module) it runs each module for a bit and gets an average load. Then it divides them up in to two groups, trying to make the loads as equal as possible. Sometimes if one or more modules has an irregular load then the grouping of modules might be less than ideal and you see a few % increase.
The irregular load could be from time/block based processing (e.g. spikes) or it could be from the params (e.g. as frequency goes up, the load goes up).
Also the processor has two levels of cache memory and depending on complex behaviors, certain code paths or data might be “cold” when the load test is run, skewing the results a tiny bit.
So, lots of factors can add up to a few percent differences.