However, it still didn't solve my problem. A patch which runs on Linux at comfortably less than half of my Athlon XP 1.8 GHz shuttle's CPU goes *way* over the line on my P4 1.6 Ghz laptop.
this is just a ballpark guess, but a p4 1.6g is proably equivalent to something like a 1.0 or 1.2g athlon. 50% cpu in one could be 70-80 in the other, and since dropouts may happen before reaching 100 due to system/driver overhead...at least many vst hosts seem to max out before the meter does..
back in the days of WindowsXP, there was a great program called "Iarsn TaskInfo" which is like some crazy combination of gtop/gkrellm/netstat/ps and not only breaks down cpu/mem usage per process, but has a realtime cpu/mem graph for each thread and loaded library. so for example, if creb.dll is running away with CPU, or something in zexy is chewing up your RAM, you can see it quite clearly..therse similar stuff for linux (see http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/show.cgi/KcacheGrindShot3 ), im just saying you might want to check and make sure its not something silly before chucking it out the window and buying that mobile athlon64...
I am really at wit's end trying to figure out what else I can optimize! I recompiled *every* external, plugin, etc with "-march=pentium4 -O2 -mfpmath=sse -msse -msse2 -mmmx" again yesterday, and used all the P4 optimizations which Tim has included in the cvs branch. This craptop is about to go out the window, really....