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Old 08-18-2018, 05:13 PM   #1
Dannii
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Default REAPER Performance on Linux vs Windows

I've been quietly following the development of REAPER for Linux now for a while and even experimented a little with a Linux install a while back. That was before the native Linux version was available though.

My primary question is about the performance differences of the current REAPER versions on Linux vs Windows. Has anyone done a direct comparison of CPU usage and latency on the same PC under both systems? REAPER runs extremely well on my Win10 rig (i7 7700K, 32GB RAM, Asus Z270 Prime, 3x Samsung 850 500GB SSD) and is rock solid. Same with the drivers for my hardware (RME Fireface UFX & MOTU MIDI Timepiece AV).

There are numerous things holding me back from running Linux at present, the main ones being compatibility with Windows plugins (I have thousands of dollars worth of third party Windows plugins and applications that I use pretty much constantly) and the whole learning curve thing of configuring and tweaking an OS I am not intimately familiar with. The latter is obviously just a matter of digging in and learning.
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Old 08-18-2018, 09:45 PM   #2
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Aside from compatibility issues, it would be difficult for Linux to *not* be faster/lighter than Windows. I don't mean that in the usual "haha Windows sucks" sense - Linux is much smaller and (by default) is doing way less in the background. As an example, I can fully reboot in about ten seconds right now compared to maybe a minute at best with Windows 8.

Re: plugins - I'm surprised at how many of mine work with LinVST as a wrapper. Depending on where/how they store things, you may have to mess around with copying or linking their settings from the Windows drive.

Re: apps - This was the biggest reason why, in the past, my forays into Linux were aborted. I need to do things and couldn't. This time that doesn't seem to be the case - between lots of software offering Linux versions, Linux equivalents for the ones that don't, and Wine for everything else, you might be surprised at how well it goes. Or maybe it will be terrible. Who knows?

If you have the time, a dual-boot setup is pretty painless these days and gives you the flexibility to work in Linux when you feel like it while having Windows a few keystrokes away. You can even create links from the Linux file system to My Documents and all that, minimizing the time spent going back and forth in the file manager.

You'll definitely have to get very, very intimate with the Terminal though. No real way around it for what we do.
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Old 08-19-2018, 04:06 AM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lokasenna View Post
Aside from compatibility issues, it would be difficult for Linux to *not* be faster/lighter than Windows. I don't mean that in the usual "haha Windows sucks" sense - Linux is much smaller and (by default) is doing way less in the background. As an example, I can fully reboot in about ten seconds right now compared to maybe a minute at best with Windows 8.
Yes, Windows has enabled a lot of excess services by default.
Rebooting on Win 10 takes 10 seconds or so here.

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If you have the time, a dual-boot setup is pretty painless these days and gives you the flexibility to work in Linux when you feel like it while having Windows a few keystrokes away. You can even create links from the Linux file system to My Documents and all that, minimizing the time spent going back and forth in the file manager.
The one weakness of this solution is a lack of access to other file system on both systems. I can be wrong, if so correct me please.
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Old 08-19-2018, 04:20 AM   #4
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The one weakness of this solution is a lack of access to other file system on both systems. I can be wrong, if so correct me please.
Linux can read NTFS but windows can't read linux file systems. You can set up a different drive or partition with NTFS and then both systems will be able to use it.
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Old 08-19-2018, 04:49 AM   #5
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Linux can read NTFS but windows can't read linux file systems. You can set up a different drive or partition with NTFS and then both systems will be able to use it.
Ok, thanks for the explanation. So I was half-right.
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Old 08-19-2018, 05:09 AM   #6
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It's possible to setup a linux system to read/write NTFS, but you need some user space software, it's not built into the kernel (the built in support is readonly). Though IIRC one had to disable fast suspend or something like that on windows, though this might have changed as I haven't done this for a long time.

AFAIK, there are a few solutions to mount linux file systems in windows too, most of them without a drive letter and just support in the file manager.

If it's just for exchanging data, maybe creating a fat32 partition would do, though it won't support linux file permissions, so not useful as a main storage system for linux.
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Old 08-19-2018, 05:15 AM   #7
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You could install Fuse to add read/write support for alien file systems.

http://linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/vie...tlfs/fuse.html

Or you could use a FAT disk as intermediary. FAT is accessible by all OS'es. NTFS isn(t ideal for this task, as there is no documentation available from MS, so it's kind of experimental on everything but Windows.
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Old 08-19-2018, 10:09 AM   #8
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The user-friendly distros should all have NTFS capability out of the box at this point - you might just need to tell it to mount the drive for you.

My sample/plugin/music drive is a Windows Dynamic Disk (or Spanned Volume or Logical Disk... they have a bunch of names for it), which Ubuntu can't immediately see, but finding and mounting it are very simple.

As for Windows accessing the Linux system... you really shouldn't need to.

Linux can also make symbolic links very easily, so you can literally share your My Documents folder, or the AppData/Roaming/whatever folder for some VST's presets, or your Reaper script folder, etc, without having to copy files manually.
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Old 08-19-2018, 10:22 AM   #9
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Yes, Windows has enabled a lot of excess services by default.
Rebooting on Win 10 takes 10 seconds or so here.
Lucky you. My wife's Win 10 laptop will occasionally spike to 100% disk usage for about half an hour and we can't figure out why. She really, really loves that when she's trying to work.
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Old 08-19-2018, 10:39 AM   #10
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Lucky you. My wife's Win 10 laptop will occasionally spike to 100% disk usage for about half an hour and we can't figure out why. She really, really loves that when she's trying to work.
Perhaps she uses Windows Defender? Or maybe it sends a lot of telemetry?
Also I disabled automatic updates. Probably this is the reason.
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Old 08-19-2018, 10:45 AM   #11
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From what I can tell it's Windows indexing the drive - seems to be a known issue, but one of those issues with five or six different "this worked for me!" fixes that don't work for anyone else.
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Old 08-19-2018, 02:50 PM   #12
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I think the Windows side will have a slight performance advantage at the moment, partly because the Windows builds are icc-compiled vs the linux builds which still use gcc (and an older gcc version at that).

I did tests with compiling with icc-linux, but there were a lot of issues preventing us from using it for release builds.

Also: I'm sure a lot of linux people will probably disagree, but I think even with realtime patched kernels, the Windows thread scheduler has some advantages. Though dealing with crusty third-party drivers and DPC issues on Windows makes me sad, not to mention Windows Update causing havoc (performance aside, I vastly prefer Linux nowadays).
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Old 08-19-2018, 08:03 PM   #13
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Quote:
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Also: I'm sure a lot of linux people will probably disagree, but I think even with realtime patched kernels, the Windows thread scheduler has some advantages. Though dealing with crusty third-party drivers and DPC issues on Windows makes me sad, not to mention Windows Update causing havoc (performance aside, I vastly prefer Linux nowadays).
hey, Justin, have you tried MuQSS scheduler?

http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/muqss/sched-MuQSS.txt

This cpu scheduler comes within the -ck patchset (in my case linux-ck from the Arch User Repository).

I've started using this scheduler (and brainfuck scheduler before, BFS, same author) some years ago for audio work; SCHED_ISO and SCHED_IDLEPRIO scheduling policies combo is awesome, SCHED_ISO reaper and SCHED_IDLEPRIO firefox and... make? In case you wanted to compile some big program and play a synth while waiting... :P

In my early years with linux audio I tried rt patchset but I noticed a decrease on throughtput and went back to CFS. This was before I started using Con's. I really recommend anyone curious about this to give it a go.

Here is some info:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Linux-ck

http://ck-hack.blogspot.com/
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Old 08-19-2018, 10:11 PM   #14
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There is also work being done on something called SCHED_DEADLINE, which might be interesting for audio work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCHED_DEADLINE
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Old 08-25-2018, 01:06 PM   #15
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Lucky you. My wife's Win 10 laptop will occasionally spike to 100% disk usage for about half an hour and we can't figure out why. She really, really loves that when she's trying to work.
Strip W10 to the bone. Get shot of all that background process rubbish. All the telemetry, the lot. It's a pain to have to do it, but it can really help.

Hey, do you really need some silly winking window telling you that it's raining outside or that Uncle Dan's just called? You have a real window to look out of and you've already spoken to Uncle Dan and assured him that he hasn't "broken the internet". And you don't even use a damn Xbox...

I'd like to meet and throttle the genius at Redmond who thought it would be a good idea to present you with an insulting frowny face blue screen of doom (FBSOD) when something goes wrong, then offer to try to fix the problem and always fail. It's usually that bloody Synaptics crap...

I do actually remain on W10 and it's fine, but I'll often go and live in a virtual Linux "room" for a while (I'm in Ubuntu as we speak - W10 is caretaker in the background). With zippy modern hardware it's a lot less hassle than setting up a dual boot and it's getting harder to notice the difference. Plus Linux's efficiencies often make up for any virtualisation lag.

Wouldn't yet use this approach for a DAW project though. When I'm working, I really need all guns blazing and for now that's in W10.
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Old 08-25-2018, 03:57 PM   #16
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Quote:
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I think the Windows side will have a slight performance advantage at the moment, partly because the Windows builds are icc-compiled vs the linux builds which still use gcc (and an older gcc version at that).

I did tests with compiling with icc-linux, but there were a lot of issues preventing us from using it for release builds.

Also: I'm sure a lot of linux people will probably disagree, but I think even with realtime patched kernels, the Windows thread scheduler has some advantages. Though dealing with crusty third-party drivers and DPC issues on Windows makes me sad, not to mention Windows Update causing havoc (performance aside, I vastly prefer Linux nowadays).
There may be improvements if the linux audio apps are
actually compiled using the same installed RT kernel they run on,
compared to having an RT kernel in a distro, with apps installed from regular repositories. I believe Studio 1337 does that, I don't recall
other distro-creator-devs specifically mentioning doing such.
Cheers
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Old 08-25-2018, 05:14 PM   #17
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Even if that were to be true, it's kind of irrelevant as Reaper is distributed in binary form..
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Old 08-26-2018, 02:04 PM   #18
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My use of Reaper still benefits from being in fast stable systems,
with surrounding apps also fast and stable. Otherwise I'd be
one of millions of soggy wet rats, getting peed upon by every unwanted/unstoppable win 10 update dribbling out of msofts...well,
too too much information...
Cheers
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Old 08-26-2018, 02:19 PM   #19
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 4duhwinnn View Post
My use of Reaper still benefits from being in fast stable systems,
with surrounding apps also fast and stable. Otherwise I'd be
one of millions of soggy wet rats, getting peed upon by every unwanted/unstoppable win 10 update dribbling out of msofts...well,
too too much information...
Cheers
I do sympathise, but you can actually manage Windows updates. I just leave the auto off and when I'm not working run the update checker. Much as you'd do with many Linux distros, really.

REAPER in W10 is very stable (it was coded for that environment after all). The only serious concern is security, but then if you're knee deep in demanding audio porridge it's probably not a good idea to be online in the background anyway. And Linux isn't intrinsically that much more secure (I've hacked it myself for educational purposes) - it's just that Windows and MacOS (pretty much a kind of bespoke commercialised Linux anyway) are far more widely used, so they attract more unwelcome attention.
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Old 08-26-2018, 04:03 PM   #20
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You can _partially_ manage updates, and that only if you opt-in
to being a certifiable-IT-geek-ms-fanboi, and speaking of fans, from a
much larger and more diverse forum, a typical win 10 problem,
and not from an office-drone-safety-sanctuary zone,
with unicorn wallpaper...

"When you install W 10 it uses all their drivers even if you disable or skip network setup during and after install. In order to insrall thr proper drivers you have to disable driver signatures. The reason I bring this up is my laptop is thermally challenged to begin with and after up and running the fan was constantly running high rpm the rpm was all over the place. When I went online and for instance came here to check up, I could only have the browser open for a few minutes or thermal shut down. So I updated my graphics driver cause out of no where I remembered that was at least one solution. that hekped a little but not enough. so back in device manger and found a couple instances of base device with !! I tried the Roxio drivers from my model at ASUS and the took. Still no thermal solution though, then I found 2 ACPI thermal zone drivers in sytem devices. Updated with ASUS ATK and both took but one had a ! and came up this device is not working properly. I should have updated auto but uninstalled instead thinking MS would install. MS asked to so I restarted and it sat in limbo for too long telling me not to shut off. I had to pull the power and battery to get it to boot from bios. So I'm guessing I have 2 thermal zone drivers, 1 for the CPU the other for the GPU,any ways it's up and running cooler and no thermal shut downs. MS seems to think they know all about all drivers for all hardware. what a bunch of jerkoffs. replaced a bunch of their crap with the proper intel drivers as well. Still having issues with the cardslot reader, I know it takes Roxio drivers and I have them. just can't get them to load.

Another thing,when MS does updates you don't have a clue about it. nothing comes up from the task bar, I just see the drive light start blinking more and here the fan winding up and wonder what the hell is that. have to go looking around till I figure out what's going on. more MS jerkoffs. "

--------------------------

Cheers
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Old 08-27-2018, 02:12 AM   #21
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Well, I'm not a tribalist for anyone or a Windows specialist. Apart from the annoying Synaptics business, now fixed, I've never had problems with it. You can dislike Redmond for any number of reasons and thanks to the open source community you don't have to use their products at all. Interestingly, most offices I walk into these days have OpenOffice or Libre and GIMP installed as default. They do, I presume, pay commercial licences.

By rights as a first gen C/UNIX programmer from way back with a contempt for bloat, I should be against MS, but I'm not really. Their products have been very useful to me.

In general (not including you in this), there is a weirdness about some Linux users. For one thing they seem driven by unhealthy revolutionary rage. For another they get absolutely messianic about their distro of choice. "Mint is for wimps", "openSUSE forever!" "Real men use Arch", etc. Talk about "fanbois"...

This strikes me as really odd. One of the best things about Linux is choice, so why tie yourself to one implementation when you don't have to? All distros are constantly evolving, so I keep a couple going side by side (with shared data folder), and a few others in VMs for evaluation. In a race without a finish line you can pick one from the front runners, but not a winner.

Another irony for me is that so many people forget probably the most important principle of C - don't reinvent the wheel. REAPER bristling with VSTs and Kontakt libraries and occasionally synced to video runs very well on W10 for me, so for now...

In case you're curious, my current main two distros are Mint and Ubuntu, plus Kali for ahem educational purposes and Manjaro on test.
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Old 08-27-2018, 05:09 AM   #22
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Quote:
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I do sympathise, but you can actually manage Windows updates. I just leave the auto off and when I'm not working run the update checker. Much as you'd do with many Linux distros, really.
I've found some of my Win10 installations having Windows Update background services sitting there chewing a couple of cores for no (apparent) reason, when I'm trying to do work. Maybe not noticeable on high end systems, but on an old c2d laptop it a) interrupts low latency audio processing, and b) makes the fan go nuts. Anyway...
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Old 02-23-2021, 06:14 PM   #23
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I have been a long time on dual boot with Win 7 , then win10 , and i am happy that i do not use windows anymore , i still have it for MSFS2020 , that's all,and i do not know if i will keep it.As for ReaperLinux , i find it more performant on my linuxlite 4.8.My win vst's work fine with linvstconvert.
i hate microsoft , because its always "wait , we are doing something"
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Old 02-26-2021, 09:15 PM   #24
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Linux vs Win trace image... https://www.quora.com/q/linuxmusicre...eJIwP3dwADj-gQ
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