Performance issue when hosting a VST3 plugin in a Juce wrapper

Audio Plugins
1

Hi,
I am on JUCE 7.0.8 and noticed when hosting a plugin (with a simple wrapper implementation as Host a VST in an audio plugin )
the CPU load increases by a multiple of about 7x, compared to hosting the plugin directly in the DAW.
Is this the expected CPU overhead?
Here is how i tested.
I loaded 10 x Fabfilter VST3 Pro C2 plugins (default preset) on each of 64 tracks (640 plugins in total) in Ableton Live on an M1 Mac, using coreaudio at 1024 buffer size, and the A.L. CPU meter showed 8% utilization, even when playing.

I repeated the same test with 10 wrapper plugins on each track without having a plugin hosted
and the A.L. CPU meter showed about 12% utilization.

Then I repeated the test with 10 wrapper plugins on each track, each hosting an FF Pro C2 plugin. The A.L. CPU meter showed about 60% utilization.

My question is, if we are not doing any DSP processing in the wrapper, why there is such a big difference in CPU usage?

Or perhaps I am doing something wrong here?

Thank you very much!

3

Are you testing with Debug builds or Release builds? My experience has been that Debug builds tend to be less performant than Release …

4

Hi,
the test was with Release.