Regarding "the application (or plugin) as such also needs some MB of course ..": I was wondering whether people have seriously looked into the amount of RAM each extra VI instance adds to what Vienna Ensemble consumes. Specifically, I clearly remember that an instance in VE, according to the promo videos comes in instantaneously "because it is already there", but if I monitor my resources whilst adding an empty VI instance in VE, it actually loads another 20 MB. I know this does not sound like a giant lot to most of us here, but the fact remains that most patches require less than that (as long as they're not legato), and far less even if the RAM has been 'rinsed', so to speak. So, usually, I use so many VI instances that my RAM (a somewhat meagre 2 GB) mostly seems to have to cope with the VI instances, not the samples themselves.
Anyway, from a programmer's point of view, it seems to me that quite a bit of the 20 mb (x 40 instances is about 800 MB) is redundant information: the GUI of the instances is always the same, that sort of thing. Can we expect that a later version of VE might implement a way to 'share' (like the memory for samples is shared, as you say above) some of the memory that is now common amongst instances, yet treated independently?
Second question: is there anything that can be done about Windows garbage-collecting memory that is used by the VE? It's not new for softsamplers, I remember HALion in particular being a pain after leaving the computer for dinner break... The idea is that after some time, memory that is not used gets, well, I don't know what, but I presume it is being garbage-collected or something, because it is certainly not instantly accessible anymore. I try this: load everything, vienna instances tell me there's 150 mb left... wait an hour, play: stuttering and crackling like a crackw - er, nevermind. Memory left: suddenly there's 400 mb! So, what I do now is just looping my song, so everything is still okay after dinner, no dips, and that works, except that I can't really do that with live performances. The question then: am I guessing correctly and is it garbage-collection (or is that too .net?), but more importantly, can something be done about it?
Thanks for everything, I remain a great vsl enthousiast!
Cheers,
Michiel
Note: I use VE 2.02 and VI 1.14 on Windows Vista and XP SP2, Xeon AMD 3800+, 2G RAM, usually as a plugin in Cubase Studio 4.1.1 via an MAudio Fasttrack pro or Behringer BCA2000.
