Can it be? Xlutup Chainer has a bug?

[LPChip]

I've came to the conclusion that Xlutop Chainer might have a memory-leak bug or something similar.

I've used this program quite alot, and I'm quite fund of it, especially since I can load/save .fxb's for a quick workflow.

But I've had some serious problems in the past. Sometimes when using Xlutop Chainer in my song and closing the song MPT would crash and vanish without a warning. Long research has pointed out that unloading Xlutop would crash OpenMPT in unknown conditions. Its quite frustrating but thats not the worst problem.

When I was working on my christmas song, and I had battery3 in it, I noticed that some of the drums were not being played or cut-off too soon. It appeared that battery3 was hitting a cpu lag. It was this bad, that at a certain moment, there wasn't any sound at battery 3 at all (where I had only 1 instance of battery 3 in chainer with no other plugin in it.

I know that Battery 3 is a heavy-weight plugin, but if I use just Battery3 without a chainer, everything is fine. Putting it inside chainer suddenly gives cpu errors. Stressing the cpu a little after that point starts battery to cut notes.

In the quest, I've done quite some removing and setting back, and I'm at a point where things seem to work again, but I fear that things get worse again.

There are some xlutop chainer users here. Is anyone experiencing this too?

[bvanoudtshoorn]

Well, the crash on closing, yes. (I've brought it up before, in fact). I don't think there's a memory leak -- memory usage seems pretty stable once I've got things loaded in. I've also not had problems with dropped notes etc. unless I'm *really* pushing things -- you know, a hundred and one convolution filters chained up in Kontakt to play back a 3GB instrument. Or ten.

[Relabsoluness]

Any experiences does the Chainer have similar problems under other hosts?

[psishock]

Heavy Xlutop Chainer user here.
Hmmmm what you are saying is quite interesting. I cannot decide that the problem itself is an OMPT compatibility error or a Chainer one.
I've found out example over the long time that if Winamp is opened, the cpu consumption in OMPT is raising almost to double when using VSTis (minimised to tray with absolutely no GUI present, or brought up in foreground gives the same effect). Maybe you should try and turn off every background process first, and then check how is the problem behaving.
Even i've experienced some other occasional (very, very rare) Native Instrument VSTi crashes in OMPT with and without Chainer (but it seemed that it's maybe more stable with Chainer), so it's maybe some NI OMPT compatibility problem.
On the other hand, in Renoise i haven't experienced any crashes and weird cpu consumptions at all, with or without Chainer.
I am one of the heaviest VSTI user (up to 60+ instruments, plus a lot of afterefects), so the matter is well tested in both cases imo.

EDIT: no problems with notes here, never experienced a dropped note even on pushy situations. Got to watch to the polyphony limit settings tho (in VSTIs), maybe the dropped note is because of the low default.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

Well, psishock, the reason I bought Chainer in the first place was because Kontakt doesn't run properly under OpenMPT at all, in my experience. :/ And although 95% of my stuff uses just Kontakt, the 5% that doesn't benefits from Chainer's magnificence.

As to background apps -- I've found that Thunderbird can also be a bit of a problem. It likes to steal CPU when checking mail. Best thing is to close it entirely, or, if you can't bear the thought of not getting your email, open the task manager and drop it's priority down to Low and OpenMPT's up to High. (Actually, it'd be nice if we could get OpenMPT to do this automatically... Hmm...)

I've also found that virus scanners can be a tad annoying -- AVG will scan everything when I un load it from memory (I've set it not to scan various directories containing my samples etc. on file access), which can take a while.


In the meantime, you can at least increase the efficiency with which OpenMPT crashes by disabling Windows' error reporting mechanism -- this'll let OpenMPT fall a lot more quickly, so you can load it up more quickly.

[psishock]

Well, psishock, the reason I bought Chainer in the first place was because Kontakt doesn't run properly under OpenMPT at all, in my experience.

Haven't tested Kontakt tho, neither worked with samplers since i've went VSTi. I'm trying to avoid using any prerendered samples lately (i have my reasons, its the part of my sound generating learning process), with more or less success , but i can believe that some of the plugins are not even starting without Chainer.
If i can remember correctly, this was the first main reason because i went to Chainer. After this a couple of more goodies came like assigning the higher value VSTi parameters and so on...

I've also found that virus scanners can be a tad annoying -- AVG will scan everything when I un load it from memory (I've set it not to scan various directories containing my samples etc. on file access), which can take a while.

Hmmm careful, you maybe only closed the control panel application, but the "engine" is still running on the background. Try to "uncheck" the file/internet scanning engines and leave the control panel open, it may fix the scanning issues.

In the meantime, you can at least increase the efficiency with which OpenMPT crashes by disabling Windows' error reporting mechanism -- this'll let OpenMPT fall a lot more quickly, so you can load it up more quickly.

Looool Barry :lol:

[bvanoudtshoorn]

Hmmm careful, you maybe only closed the control panel application, but the "engine" is still running on the background. Try to "uncheck" the file/internet scanning engines and leave the control panel open, it may fix the scanning issues.

Oh, the engine's running -- I just told it not to scan certain directories. Everything else still gets done properly.

[LPChip]

First of all, thanks to everyone posting in this topic thusfar. The weird thing about my cpu problem is not that I'm running out of CPU power, cus I'm not.

I have a Logitech G15 keyboard with LCD panel, and it can display my CPU usage. This isn't getting over 30% most of the time, and when stressed maybe up to 40%. I am using dual core, so that would be a respective 60% to 80%.

Whenever I'm using Battery outside of chainer, these values match the ones in Batteries Interface. Or better said, Battery shows the right info. When using inside Xlutop however, Battery says there's more cpu usage going on and the red cpu led in battery starts to lit occasionally. If I just move the chainer interface with batteries interface open, I get nearly non-stop CPU warnings in battery.

But maybe I can solve my problem by doing a windows reinstall, cus also these weird crashes I've had which Barry experienced too are things I've never experienced before, and I know my windows can be more stable than it currently is.

[psishock]

I have a Logitech G15 keyboard with LCD panel, and it can display my CPU usage. This isn't getting over 30% most of the time, and when stressed maybe up to 40%. I am using dual core, so that would be a respective 60% to 80%.

Well, it's not exactly like that, you c that why i've asked for multicore core support not so long ago. If you're using ompt you will never be able to utilize more than "50%" of your total cpu power on dualcores (no matter if the VSTi is supporting the multicore technology or not), so when you reach that limit, the cracklings will appear, thus one of the cores is 100% utilized, and you cannot push beyond. If you try a multicore supporting host, you will c that it can nicely utilize every of the cores and the total cpu usage can go anytime to 100%, means (approximately) double performance gain. So if in ompt you're running beyond 40%, you're quite near the limit.

[LPChip]

Yes, I know. Thats why  I added respectivelly 60% and 80%. I'm not reaching the maximum, yet battery says it does.