SmartFX Best Place to Check Out Parameters

Question

I have a fully functioning plugin (woo hoo!) and now I'm attempting to optimise it so it runs as quickly and efficiently as possible.
One thought occurred to me after I looked over the Shifter example code supplied with the SDK (figuring out using the Iteration suites) - where is the best place to check out my parameters - Pre-render, or Smart Render?
At the moment I check out all except for the layers during the call to Smart Render. There are a lot of parameters too, potentially, and from these I populate a bunch of variables I later use to draw my various scopes.
The Shifter example checks out its parameters during Pre-render and populates a data structure, which gets sent to Smart Render via the extra data.
I'm assuming that Smart Render never gets called without a Pre-render, so is there any advantage (apart from not having to check in my parameters) to doing all this in Pre-render? One thing that springs to mind is that now I'm starting to make use of IterateGeneric() for multi-threading I need to populate a (big) data structure to pass as my refcon, and I could start building this data during pre-render and pass the handle to Smart Render in pre_render_data, as in the Shifter example. This might save a whole load of function variables at render time.
Thoughts?
Also, any other pro optimisation tips and hints gratefully received!
Thanks, Christian

Answer 1

I think the big bushy beard on my face suggests that I am indeed a MAN!
Now it's working as it should I think a rewrite is in order to optimise, and start putting things in their right place. Obviously I'm checking out my layers during prerender but that's all at the moment. However my main drawing code is currently just two nested for loops (for y and x), so single-threaded. I've moved one of the scopes to a row-based function called by iterage_generic(), and with it a quite large refcon structure to carry all the vital position, scale, etc., information I need to draw the scope properly. If I'm to get all this info for all the scopes into the refcon, then I might as well take the time to do it during pre-render (where possible).
> 1. if the inside of your iteration function looks like this:
PF_Err err = PF_Err_NONE;
AEGP_SuiteHandler suites(in_data->pica_basicP);
suites.someSuite()->someFunction();
I made this mistake very early on in development, and after figuring out it was the reason why the plugin ground AE to a halt, learned not to do it again!
> 3. if your plug-in does a whole lot of floating point math, then consider setting the compiler's floating point model from it's default "precise" to "fast".
My plugin actually does all of its internal work in 32-bit float. I figured it would be easier to write and maintain if I only had a single function for each part, rather than three. I can't see how to do this in XCode yet (Windows will come later).
> (and you do know about the optimization options in your compiler, right?)
Well, I've been looking into this, but any info you can share would be great. So far I've seen the following in XCode, which I can set for "release" mode:
"Debug Information Format" to nothing
"Strip Debug Symbols During Copy" to Yes
"Optimization Level" to Fastest, Aggressive Optimisation
But I'm sure there must be more...
Thanks, Christian