A Wagner-Sized Benchmark

When we last measured Ooloi’s storage engine, 50,000 musical objects occupied 14.5 KB – about 0.3 bytes per note. That already hinted at something unusual. The new benchmarks confirm it.

A 1,000-measure orchestral score for 3333 / 4331 + piano + divisi strings was used as the test case – the kind of piece length found in the largest late-Romantic works: Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Strauss’s Elektra, or Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.

For non-musicians, 3333 / 4331 means three flutes, three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, one tuba; plus piano and strings divided into multiple independent parts. In total: 29 staves, over 520 000 pitches, and thousands of simultaneous events – a scale that has historically defeated notation programs.

So the orchestra is medium-sized romantic, but the length and amount of music is extreme: everyone is playing fast notes from start to finish. The benchmark is designed to test a heavy score. Bring on the worst case, so to speak.

File Size and Persistence

Saving this complete piece took 1.3 seconds; loading it, 3.3 seconds. The resulting file was 172 KB – smaller than a single page of PDF. The piece does not yet include graphical information (layout, coordinates, glyphs), which would roughly double the size or more, but at these levels it makes no practical difference. Even if it becomes ten times larger, it's still of no consequence. The numbers are that good.

Streaming export (MIDI or MusicXML) completed in 1.25 seconds, using under 10 MB of memory. Even full materialisation of every internal element peaked at 244 MB, far below what such scores normally require.

Traversal and Computation

​Behind those figures lies the traversal engine that makes them possible. The full 520 000-pitch traversal completed in 0.58 seconds – roughly one million pitches per second. Cache repairs and dependency updates finished in 1–5 ms. Endpoint searches (for ties and slurs) are blazingly fast too, obviating the need for direct pointers.

For comparison, a score of this magnitude would have strained the limits of any existing notation program. Finale or Sibelius might take tens of seconds – sometimes minutes – to perform an equivalent operation. Ooloi completes the same structural pass between heartbeats.

What the Numbers Mean

What makes this possible is not optimisation trickery but architecture: immutable musical data, transducer-based traversal, and disciplined cache coherence across every layer. The system streams; it does not churn.

​For composers and engravers, these results suggest something once thought impossible – that even a full Wagnerian tutti might one day update instantly after an edit. Everything so far indicates that this should be achievable, not through hardware brute force but through architectural clarity.

For developers, the message is the same: a purely functional, streaming model can handle orchestral-scale data in constant memory, with sub-millisecond locality.

As far as I know, this is the first time a professional notation system has demonstrated real-time traversal of a Wagner-scale score with constant memory and sub-second exports. The invisible foundation – the hard part – is finished.

​All tests were run on a 2017 MacBook Pro with a 2.2 GHz six-core Intel i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM. A modern 2025 laptop or workstation would almost certainly halve every number reported here, and perhaps more. What feels instantaneous today will, in a few years, be beyond perception.

​Full benchmark results here.

Still on track towards that goal of smooth scrolling through the Elektra recognition scene.