What makes Saw requiring "more memory than other apps"?

[swing]

I hope I make ppl laugh again:) with my uninformed questions!

I operate on a slick trimmed w2k - booting up att 45Mg Ram and idling - saw takes that to 225Mb - I'm not complaining - just curious.

Sonar 3 takes my 45 to 65. And that's a cpu heavy app right?

SAW is not - so it's about RAM - right?

How does this come together? I wanna learn!:)

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[AudioAstronomer]

Windows does not report SAW's ram usage correctly most of the time for one.

On my main daw, saw only EVER takes up 640K lol :)

Ive seen it shoot up to 700mb on my laptop... which only has 768mb ram... with about a cumaltive of 200mb taken up by other programs (editing)... not possible.

It's most likely Bob accessing ram directly, which has always made me wonder if that's so, it would be pretty easy to get memory leaks with a lot of other software going... but I've never seen it happen...

ah well, does it really matter if it's working? :) I can run SSL all loaded up with 256mb of ram easily, did it last week when I put the wrong sticks in my DAW ;) didnt even notice till much later when trying to work with other software that had a serious memory leak

[Bob L]

SAWStudio sets up all its ram buffers at start time.. for performance reasons.. since leaving Windows totally free to allocate and de-allocate buffers on the fly can cause glitching and such, because its not very predictable how long Windows will take to assign ram to an app at any given time.

So, allocatinmg the ram at start time shows a large hit on the memory meters... but in truth, Windows does not actually give up the ram, usually, until its actually accessed... then it gets caught with its pants down, and stops everything else, frantically trying to make good on its ram offer. :)

SAWStudio also grows its ram needs as the sessions get more complex and demand more area for growing databases of regions, and automation and so forth... so you will see ram numbers jump radically as you open and close large sessions.

The need for ram is intensified by the design goals of emulating a large scale console and much of its routing capabilities. Every internal storage and summing bus is actually done in huge amounts of ram, passing data from bus to bus internally working its way out to the final mix outputs. The idea of the engine allowing plugins to absorb and give back different amounts of samples than received is another ram hog, because huge amounts of caching must take place for every channel so that in the end, everything can be lined back up in sync.

Memory Managment in Windows is definitely a black art... and I am always wrestling with better ways to handle it as the program evolves.

All I would suggest, is since ram has gotten so inexpensive these days, if you want the performance and power that SAWStudio brings to the table... just buy the ram and forget about it. :)

512 mb min... 1 gig average... 2 gig and more for killer rig.

Bob L

[swing]

"but in truth, Windows does not actually give up the ram, usually, until its actually accessed... then it gets caught with its pants down, and stops everything else, frantically trying to make good on its ram offer."

This is a musical statement

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[Shawn]

LOL! :D

[swing]

and i love it

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