We now use shared memory to store the input and output audio buffers.
This means that we have to copy less data every processing cycle, since
a single copy to and a single copy from the shared memory object
suffices now. This should reduce the DSP load for VST2
plugins (especially when used in a plugin group) marginally to
significantly depending on the plugins used and the system
configuration.
Every DAW will just send all events in one go (and I think that's the
only way you should do it, but the VST2 spec is a bit leaky so who
knows). It wouldn't make much sense to preallocate more capacity,
because when DAWs do send all of those events individually they might
end up sending more than four of these anyways.
I once read years ago somewhere on Stack Overflow that `std::vectors`
with that are preinitialized to a default size would allocate the
initial capacity on the stack. This of course doesn't make any
sense (run time sized stack allocations can cause all kinds of issues),
so we were still allocating with our default 64-byte sized buffers, but
just not as often.
We'll periodically copy the scheduling priorities from the host's audio
threads to the Wine plugin host's audio threads. The overhead of doing
this is about 1 microsecond on my system, so doing this every cycle
really adds up. But getting the Unix epoch time and comparing some
timestamps has a neglegible overhead, so this should give you the best
of both worlds.
Next we'll do the same thing for VST3 plugins.
As suggested by @jhernberg
Robbert van der Helm