In-line plugin display causes plugin-GUI slowdown

I discovered an issue with having too many a-Compressors on different tracks with the in-line displays activated. After I have 3 or more tracks that show the a-Compressor inline display, the GUI for the plugin area only slows down and dragging items or editing pinouts becomes impossible.

The solution is to deactivate the inline display on the a-Compressor plugins. It may be the same for other plugins, but I have not tested any others yet.

I wanted to post this so others might benefit. It took me awhile to discover why the plugin GUI was not responsive. The rest of the Ardour GUI works fine and the DSP % is very low, so it seems to be some kind of bug in the thread for the plugin GUI.

I intend to post something to the bug tracker when I get a test session prepared for upload.

[Ardour 5.8, Fedora 24]

it obviously depends on the system and 2D graphics acceleration (and resolution…). 3 tracks hmm that’s not a lot. Here it works smoothly with a mixer full of inline displays and I’ve seen similar screenshots from other users. Only criticism regarding the a-comp display so far was its size. It should be shrunk a little and refined.

Like other animations, the inline displays draw in the GUI idle callback and have no effect on DSP but can affect overall UI performance.

No such problem here either, using 5.8-41-gce2c3a9 in Xubuntu 14.04 (with XFCE/Compiz) on an Intel i5-650 GPU.
I’ve added the a-Comp (both stereo and mono) to 12 tracks in Dave Philips session http://linux-sound.org/misc/onboardtheblues.tar and I’m able to edit the settings, pinouts and drag plugins between tracks without any problem.

I’ll continue to test with different OS’s and machines. The issue was originally noticed on a Fedora 24 machine with a GeForce Card:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core/Q35/C2SBC-Q.cfm
from lspci: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 210] (rev a2)

I’ve had problems with the bundled Harrison/Xtools plugins crashing on this machine as well, so perhaps it is hardware-related.

@x42: Does it make sense that this would only affect some of the GUI elements associated with plugins (pinout, dragging), but everything else remains responsive? This post may not apply: https://community.ardour.org/node/8800

It doesn’t really feel like the plugin GUI is slowing down when I try to drag or use pinout GUI, but like there is some kind of block. e.g., I can pick up a plugin to drag it up or down in the track but it will not lock into the new new place or really even move past the initial “pick up” of the element. The pinout button for manual configuration does not turn on or off. I try to drag the connectors and they move but do not attach to new locations.