[Interest] Qt signal overhead (same thread, direct connection)

[Nuno Santos]

Hi,

I have an application that generates real time audio and in a system like this, a interruption may cause audio glitches.

Nowadays, in iOS, audio apps can be loaded by other apps. This transition takes time and probably some resources too.

While playing my app with the built in arpeggiator and then switching to another app, the notes would stop playing for a while, creating a non desired break in the flow.

The curious thing is that, if I had a single note playing, the sound was not being broken. 

Since the sound rendering engine is the same I couldn’t understand what was going on.

Then I made an experiment. Arpeggiator was using a signal to send the noteOn to the audio render engine. I decided to call the function directly on the synth render engine. Guess what, the problem disappears.

Is the signal/slot mechanism tied to the event loop? How much does it take for a signal/slot to be called? It might not be significant on a desktop computer but it certainly is on a ARM device specially in this kind of performance sensitive contexts.

After this, I’m into changing crucial functions to callbacks to improve performance. Is there any advice you could give me?

Thanks,

Regards,

Nuno

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