So I bit the bullet at the weekend and upgraded my Laptops memory from 8 Giga Bytes to 16 Giga Bytes to see if that helps with LSP 2.5
(I'm running a 64 Bit Win7 O/S, i7 Quad Core, 60Gig Solid state drive and dedicated Graphics card)
I then ran some tests to see the effect of additional memory with LSP 2.5, here's what I found
1. Macro's
The is no change in the speed of adding Macros to a sequence, if it takes 10 seconds to add a Macro with 8G of RAM, it will still take 10 seconds to add a Macro with 16G of RAM
2. Optimizing a Sequence
When a sequence is opened in the Sequencer, LSP 2.5 will automatically begin to optimize the sequence (unless you turn it off in LSP 2.5). The speed of optimization will be no faster in LSP 2.5 with 16G RAM compared to 8G RAM
3. Optimizing a large Sequence
If you attempt to play a large sequence (in my case a 38Mega Byte file) while LSP 2.5 is currently optimizing that sequence, LSP 2.5 will Throw a Memory Exception and the visualizer will stop and a Big Red X will appear in the Visualizer
4. What is the optimizer doing in LSP
I'd no code Guru, so don't quote me, but as LSP 2.5 is optimizing a sequence, it SEEMs to be creating a number of little threads that run in the background.
If you start Task Manager and look at the I/O and Disk Operations and tasks, you will see multiple tasks that are named controller 1, controller 2 etc for each of the controllers you have in the sequence, what it seems to do it to go through the effects assigned to each controller and write files out to the disk and then recompiles them into one final file when it finishes.
In my 38Mega Byte sequence, I have about 28 LED RGB controllers, most of which have somewhere in the region of 400,000 effects assigned to them, so I'm assuming that LSP is processing at least half of these (e.g. 400,000 x 14 = 5.6 Million effects) that seems to be the reason it takes my machine about 20 Mins to optimize the sequence before you can play back the sequencer in LSP 2.5
5. LSP Memory limits
LSP 2.5 never uses more than 2Giga Bytes of memory, it would seem that LSP cannot utilize more memory beyond 2Giga Bytes. You also need to take into account that other programs maybe using some of the available memory, so even if you have 2G of RAM installed, not all of the memory will be available to LSP 2.5
So in summary:
1. Faster CPUs should help with LSP 2.5 performance and wrting effects
2. Increasing memory in the PC beyond 2Giga Bytes does not increase LSP 2.5 performance either in writing effects to the sequence or when LSP 2.5 is optimizing a sequence, but increasing the total system memory may allow more memory to be available to LSP 2.5
3. Faster Hard drives should assist in optimizing sequences, since they seem to be very I/O disk intensive and should assist in writing effects/macros in the sequencer and help with the speed of optimizing a sequence
4. Very large sequences (at 38Mega Bytes and above) can cause memory exceptions when LSP optimizes the large sequence if you try to playback the sequence while LSP is still optimizing the sequence. This is far more likely as the channel counts increase, the song length increases and more complex Macros are used in a sequence