yeah, I wonder in which world they live. If I could sell a limb to get 10% more audio plug-ins in my DAW, you could be sure that my bedtime book would be "Life pro-tips for quadruple amputees"
2-10% for an already fast user space driver is nothing.
State of the art for a lot of these use cases is still the kernel driver which is ~7 times slower. Sure, all that stuff is moving to XDP/eBPF/AF_XDP, but that is still ~20-30% slower than a user-space driver.
Also, these 2-10% only show up when underclocking the CPU while running the unrealistic benchmark of forwarding packets bidirectionally on only one core (trivial to parallelize).
In the end it's about 6-12 cycles spent more in the driver. That's not a lot if you have a non-trivial application on top of it.
Fortunately for your body, this problem is easily solvable by hardware. Modern DAW's performance scales well with multithreading, for regular use cases at least.
I don't know your use case, but generally, if you have so many VST processing on a single track that it loads a core of a modern CPU, it means you're doing either something really creative, sculpting a sound, or some heavy-handed audio restoration. Both are candidates for freezing/rendering to a stem. YMMV, of course.
yeah, I wonder in which world they live. If I could sell a limb to get 10% more audio plug-ins in my DAW, you could be sure that my bedtime book would be "Life pro-tips for quadruple amputees"