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Does HW7 have slower load times from cache than 6.0.2?

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bobhehmann

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Does HW7 have slower load times from cache than 6.0.2?

PostTue Mar 29, 2022 9:25 pm

Just upgraded, and the new HW is sonically and functionally fantastic.

My only quibble is an apparent slow-down in clock-time to load a (re-cached) organ. When I originally documented all my instruments' settings, I had recorded the actual load times, taken from the log file. The new load times are consistently just short of twice as long as they were before e.g., what was before 12 seconds elapsed to load is now ~22 seconds. I verified that the organs' load/build settings are the same as before - generally, 24-bit, uncompressed, maximal-memory choices.

Nothing that I can note that has substantially changed in my configuration nor background machine load. As a test, I disabled my Anti-Virus (which is normally enabled, then and now), that did not affect the time-to-load.

Does this ring any bells?
Cheers, Bob
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mdyde

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Re: Does HW7 have slower load times from cache than 6.0.2?

PostWed Mar 30, 2022 4:14 am

Hello Bob,

[Topic moved here.]

There might be some difference (mainly depending on per-core CPU speed vs. drive speed, but also size of cache, placement/fragmentation on drive, etc.) since v7 uses a new cache format encrypted with a new version of the iLok libraries. However, I would expect any difference to be small, and in my tests it was at most 16% slower (with memory compression enabled). With SSDs, per-core CPU performance will be the bottleneck, as before (mainly due to the need to decrypt the cache).

If you're getting much slower performance than that then perhaps Windows is scanning/indexing the file (or other files) in the background at the moment, due to files having recently been installed/created. You could perhaps also try defragmenting the drive. Conceivably if you're load samples uncompressed then the decryption thread might make more of a contribution to loading times.

Loading times may benefit significantly from having CPU turbo-boost enabled (and/or similar dynamically-varying CPU performance technologies), so that the per-core performance can be boosted as much as possible during loading. However, one also needs to be careful to ensure that CPU clock speeds don't drop below their base clock speed in normal use, so as not to risk audio glitches.

(In the medium term I would very much hope we can implement a new cache-loading mechanism that's designed fundamentally to be able to take full advantage of fast modern SSDs and modern CPUs with more/unequal cores.)

bobhehmann wrote:Just upgraded, and the new HW is sonically and functionally fantastic.


Great -- thanks very much. Glad you like it.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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bobhehmann

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Re: Does HW7 have slower load times from cache than 6.0.2?

PostWed Mar 30, 2022 1:41 pm

Thanks Martin. I compared old log files with the latest, and may have a lead - this is preliminary, I'll test it later today against several more significant instruments.

First, a few things that haven't changed significantly (by my memory, confirmed by HW logs...): CPU, memory, CPU clock-speed, available resources, general config of PC. Just about every metric is either identical, or within a few %. The CPU is a 12/24 core 3900x clocked at its default, 3.7gHz+; memory is 128gB, mostly available; no page file; no special "HW" tuning.

I benched the system again last night, all perf stats are nominal e.g., SSD rate for sequential-reads remains ~7gB/sec, IOPS ~350k/sec at 4 threads... "HW-cache" device is a Gen4 NVME SSD - fragmentation is not an issue, and Windows indexing is not at work at this time. OS in Win10 Pro, at the latest public release level - in general, all MS patches are applied as they are released to the public, so the OS does vary over time, and is always "current".

However, what does look different is the CPU balance of HW's 5 "loader-threads": previously, they tended to be well-balanced, now they seem visibly skewed. For example, loading a small instrument (Cembalo Mietke) a year ago, 4 of the 5 threads were between 40-60% CPU, with 1 thread venturing into the low 80% region; today, 1 thread at 99%, 1 at 50%, the remaining 3 between 15-30%. Might have just crossed the trail of a large-snouted red-eyed bottleneck-beast... All the other modules/steps associated with the load are actually significantly faster in HW7 - it is the "audio step" which is far slower for me, which is of course the bulk of the total time.

I've only loaded a handful of instruments so far, so my sample-size is small, but it seems that smaller instruments are proportionally somewhat less affected, larger ones more so. However, for a given instrument, the slowdown % is fairly consistent load-to-load. The least slow-down I've seen is an ~50% increase in load time. ~90%+ has been more typical.
Cheers, Bob
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mdyde

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Re: Does HW7 have slower load times from cache than 6.0.2?

PostWed Mar 30, 2022 2:02 pm

Thanks, Bob.

If decrypting your caches is indeed taking noticeably longer on your PC with memory compression disabled, then there's nothing we could realistically do about it in the short-term, I'm afraid, aside from redesigning the loading mechanism completely (specifically designed/optimised for fast modern SSDs like yours), which will be a major project, but something we do very much hope to implement in the medium-term. (The caches do need to be encrypted, and the decryption is already about as optimised as it can be within a single thread, and decryption can't be split across multiple threads as it stands.)

Hence that will have to be lived with for now, I'm afraid.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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bobhehmann

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Re: Does HW7 have slower load times from cache than 6.0.2?

PostWed Mar 30, 2022 3:01 pm

Thanks Martin! No problems whatsoever. I wanted to make sure it wasn't "just me" being special and setting up something entirely wrong (no, never, I've no idea....), or possibly a somewhat obscure problem. And I really appreciate the level and quality of support I've always received from you and Francois - truly exemplary.

Best wishes. Time to wake the neighbors...
Cheers, Bob
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mdyde

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Re: Does HW7 have slower load times from cache than 6.0.2?

PostThu Mar 31, 2022 3:24 am

Thanks very much, Bob.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.

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