I’m playing around with Polyverse’s Manipulator plugin in my open source looper which of course uses JUCE. It actually all works quite well, the JUCE API for creating plugin instances is nice and simple.
But when running a release x64 build under Visual Studio 2019, I see that each instance of the Manipulator plugin I create consumes 250MB or so of heap. One of the goals of my looper is to make it easy to instantiate as many plugins as you like, but at a quarter gig per instance my RAM alone isn’t going to hold out, never mind the CPU.
Is this kind of RAM usage fairly common these days with modern VST and other audio plugins? I am thinking I will have to optimize for few instantiated plugins, recording the plugin output audio and looping that… which is too bad as I had been hoping I could just let the live plugins do it. But recording the post-plugin audio will save a lot of CPU as well, so perhaps I should just suck it up…
Curious what the best practices are around managing the memory usage of many loaded plugins. Thanks!