CPU Overload. Help. PLEASE !!

[Dork Lard]

I've got an i7 8th gen 6 core laptop, with 32GB RAM and an SSD drive.

My sessions contain quite a lot of stuff but I'm wondering if there's no workaround the agony I'm currently facing.

Here are my current settings for Buffering, Playback and Rendering, which I've tweaked to get the best performance but those may be improvable:





I'm currently using DSP's Fortin Nameless Suite (amp sim) and Two Notes Wall of Sound (cab sim) for guitars and bass, which I freeze/render because they're absolutely DESTRUCTIVE on the session when used in 4 or 5 instances. I try to freeze as many synths and keys as possible because VST's are hungry little bishes too. And then there are the drum items, but I'm constantly tweaking them so I keep them modifiable. Those are Superior Drums mostly with a bunch of EQs, comps and exciters. A very hungry beast is the Softube Drawmer 1973 (comp/EQ), which I use on about 5 or 6 tracks.

Any fixes you might think of ?

[maxdembo]

Originally Posted by Dork Lard

A very hungry beast is the Softube Drawmer 1973 (comp/EQ), which I use on about 5 or 6 tracks.

Any fixes you might think of ?

I'm on an aging PC, and I know its not really that helpful, but I had to banish the Softube Drawmer to just mastering a rendered wav on its own.

My solution had to be finding different plugs that do the same thing but dont have the massive resources hit, as lovely as the 1973 is.

EDIT: My response is less than useless

[Dork Lard]

Originally Posted by maxdembo

I'm on an aging PC, and I know its not really that helpful, but I had to banish the Softube Drawmer to just mastering a rendered wav on its own.

My solution had to be finding different plugs that do the same thing but dont have the massive resources hit, as lovely as the 1973 is.

EDIT: My response is less than useless

ah, a fellow Softube Drawmer user. Unfortunately I don't get, for my snares say, the result I do from the Drawmer with anything else, not even close how accurate and polished the track comes out of that.
But yeah, I could freeze a few Drawmers. Go to the kitchen and toss these gluttonous bastards in the freezer. We're still talking metaphorically.

But it feels sth's amiss, still. Yes I've got a LOAD in my projects, but isn't my PC being a drama queen about this ? Little slut...

I actually thought of changing switching to a brand new i9 processor with 10 or more Cores, but on these Asus models the CPU is, ofc, welded to the motherboard. The guys responsible for this should be head-shaven, squeaky clean, and then bitten hard on their scalps.

I'm getting a better SSD drive, with read/write speeds of up to 3500MB/s, but am skeptical on whether it'll improve this area specifically.

[maxdembo]

Originally Posted by Dork Lard

I'm getting a better SSD drive, with read/write speeds of up to 3500MB/s, but am skeptical on whether it'll improve this area specifically.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I dont think the drive speed will make any difference at all sadly, except loading samples faster.

[Dork Lard]

Originally Posted by maxdembo

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I dont think the drive speed will make any difference at all sadly, except loading samples faster.

best thing you can do, like in theory, is buy one of those i9 PCs with 10 or 12 CORES. Pick some of the least crazy-priced ones, and then look for a good 'refurbished' or 'used' unit. Sell your current PC, and you might lose too much in the exchange, and you'll be forever a *BOSS*. With a CPU this powerful, just 8 or 16BG RAM would suffice, and you could upgrade to 32 later. You could load up all your desired plugins in the entire session and not even think about giving a damn about it.

[maxdembo]

Originally Posted by Dork Lard

best thing you can do, like in theory, is buy one of those i9 PCs with 10 or 12 CORES. Pick some of the least crazy-priced ones, and then look for a good 'refurbished' or 'used' unit. Sell your current PC, and you might lose too much in the exchange, and you'll be forever a *BOSS*. With a CPU this powerful, just 8 or 16BG RAM would suffice, and you could upgrade to 32 later. You could load up all your desired plugins in the entire session and not even think about giving a damn about it.

I'm still perfectly happy with my i5 2500k overclocked to 4.5ghz (I think? Its been so long since I set it, maybe its 4.2, its somewhere round there ).

It still handles everything I throw at it, but I guess I've just gotten used to using it in certain ways.

No doubt it'll start showing its age in a year or two, depending on software upgrades.

[numberthirty]

Originally Posted by Dork Lard

...

I'm currently using DSP's Fortin Nameless Suite (amp sim) and Two Notes Wall of Sound (cab sim) for guitars and bass, which I freeze/render because they're absolutely DESTRUCTIVE on the session when used in 4 or 5 instances. I try to freeze as many synths and keys as possible because VST's are hungry little bishes too. And then there are the drum items, but I'm constantly tweaking them so I keep them modifiable. Those are Superior Drums mostly with a bunch of EQs, comps and exciters. A very hungry beast is the Softube Drawmer 1973 (comp/EQ), which I use on about 5 or 6 tracks.

Any fixes you might think of ?

Just spitbballin'...

The actual tracks(before you start slapping every effect under the sun on them...) for syths/keys/drums...

You ever considered rendering them out to audio, and then working with just audio tracks to apply effects to?

[OLSHALOM]

I think in general, it would be great, to have those settings a bit more dynamically. Which means to switch between snapshots of settings or so.
For example one setting for tracking with live-plugins and one for mixing.
Or really a dynamic automatic function where certain buffers adjust by its own.
Just two cents of a user who tries to handle all this and has nearly no clue about to realize such ideas :-)

At which buffersize are you running reaper? 128?
Windows 10?
It looks like an older reaper6.xx.

First of all, i would save the configuration or at least right down your values somewhere.
And all settings are related to the Buffer-size of your Audio-driver and performance change with it.
In general the bigger the buffer, means less stress for your CPU.
But that cooperates with all other buffers and PDC and is really system-related.

So you record through a ampsim on a channel, right?
As far as I understand, you could try to find settings, where the notarmed tracks are pre-rendered by the afxp as much, that their are enough resources for the RT-Audio-Thread to play the playback and calculates the Live-Plugins used.

Allow live Multiprocessing:
I would check, that there is only one track armed at a time, if possible.
Though, I would check if it really helps to give 2 cores for the Live-Fx-Processing. I guess not and would try to turn that function off (the text next to it is interesting too). BUT: TRY!

AFXP:
For the downside of waiting-time till the playback starts, i would go up with that values, just to try.
Media-Buffer-Size: 1200
Prebuffer: 100%
Render-ahead: increase in 200 steps, see what's happening when it is at 999

I found out by myself, that it makes not much sense to have a media-buffer-size of 50 and a render-ahead of 999. But again, that's My personal experience and there's none technical information about it I know about.
Somebody else?

As said, the anoying waiting-time is increased, but with a tape-maching you need first rewind the tape to it'S beginning for playing a song again...

After that, finding a Setting you like, give it a go to set Thread-priority to: Time Critical

if it got worse, I would go back to Highest and leave it there.

Thread-behaviour:

I think in general you can say:

a relaxed behaviour means less CPU but more crackles at low-buffers
an agressive behaviour means more CPU-Power used but less crackles.
That's my interpretation of the text which appears below in the preferences-window.

While your CPU is already maxed out and i speculate you use a low-buffer-size, finding a balanced value is the goal.

In my personal situation, where i go for highest buffers (4096) possible with my driver, a value of "0"(most relaxed) works just fine, cause the buffers are big enough.
I guess that would not be the case for 128spls.

Would it be possible to implement a doubling of the buffersize for AFXP?
Again, just a question of a mind totally not sure, what its asking...

There are alot of Threads on the Forum about that topic, which maybe means on one side that nobody knows what he's doing (also me included) or it all depends on a individual system. A big "?" Maybe both?

The Text showing up at the bottom of the Preferences-Window is really worth a read imo.

As i hope i could help, this are my thoughts and experiences about that topic.
And if somebody knows it better, please let me know by the wish to learn.

[maralatho]

Originally Posted by Dork Lard

best thing you can do, like in theory, is buy one of those i9 PCs with 10 or 12 CORES. Pick some of the least crazy-priced ones, and then look for a good 'refurbished' or 'used' unit. Sell your current PC, and you might lose too much in the exchange, and you'll be forever a *BOSS*. With a CPU this powerful, just 8 or 16BG RAM would suffice, and you could upgrade to 32 later. You could load up all your desired plugins in the entire session and not even think about giving a damn about it.

Core count is not a panacea. You could have a thousand cores, but if the real-time thread -- which is limited to just one core -- gets slammed, those extra cores won't help. CPU overloads are nearly always about the real-time thread getting pounded.

Things that can help:

· Eliminating or replacing CPU-hungry plugins (especially those on the master bus)
· Reducing your bit rate (anything over 48 kHz is pointless for mixing)
· Increasing your buffer size (but going over 1024 won't accomplish much)
· Moving your master bus plugins to a sub-master parent folder, and making your tracks children of that folder

[Dork Lard]

Originally Posted by numberthirty

Just spitbballin'...

The actual tracks(before you start slapping every effect under the sun on them...) for syths/keys/drums...

You ever considered rendering them out to audio, and then working with just audio tracks to apply effects to?

Did that for sure yeah, the thing with that is I'm constantly tweaking most tracks there in a session so I know I'll eventually return to, say, the snare VST and change sth directly on the VST. It limits you creatively to render tracks, and I'll do that for a few but I can't do it to all. I HAVE to with gtrs for eg, because the Fortin Suite+Two Notes Wall of Sound combo is just CPU-destructive.

Originally Posted by OLSHALOM

.

Thank you for that, I appreciate the help. Will look at all those points later on the session. Yeah, I do read the text explanations at the bottom for each parameter, but I couldn't figure out the right combination that really worked for me.

Originally Posted by maralatho

Core count is not a panacea. You could have a thousand cores, but if the real-time thread -- which is limited to just one core -- gets slammed, those extra cores won't help. CPU overloads are nearly always about the real-time thread getting pounded.

Things that can help:

· Eliminating or replacing CPU-hungry plugins (especially those on the master bus)
· Reducing your bit rate (anything over 48 kHz is pointless for mixing)
· Increasing your buffer size (but going over 1024 won't accomplish much)
· Moving your master bus plugins to a sub-master parent folder, and making your tracks children of that folder

Oh. I see. Thx for that. I would've thought cores were more important.
About your second point on 48 kHz: do you mean for anything ? Like I know I use some IRs that are higher than that.

About the last point: I tend to avoid producing too many layers of children. lol, layers of children. I found it messed with the audio. Like I used to have all my drums inside a "Drums" Bus, but that would always reduce the volume for some reason and I'd a have much easier time just having each drum track separate on its own and it worked better that way. But ur right, I bet the FX chain on the Master track slows down the session, unless it doesn't if they're on bypass, which I always do during mixing (and only turn it on again right before a render).

[maxdembo]

Hey, another thought about this...

I seem to remember reading that if there is no file on a section of a track, so no audio of any sort (even silence), the fx on that track wont be processing. So, if you have gaps in audio files, where there is silence, but the file is still there, chop that section out.

I also remember reading that Reaper doesnt use effects that are disabled, so if there are any points in the song where those effects arent being used, turning them off completely at that point with automation could also save CPU power, stretching your CPU use a little.

Just in case these are tips you missed on your travels

My memory is hazy on the first point, the latter is a definite.

[ivansc]

Originally Posted by Dork Lard

Oh. I see. Thx for that. I would've thought cores were more important.
About your second point on 48 kHz: do you mean for anything ? Like I know I use some IRs that are higher than that.

Dont use I.R.s that are recorded at over the basic rate you are using in Reaper. This alone will consume some cpu, as Reaper does the translation work on the trot.
This is strictly off the back of my head, but I can`t think of a reason NOT to use a lower rate for an I.R. in order to match your main rate.
As the Scots say, "mony a mickle maks a muckle." This on its own is probably not going to have a huge effect, but it all helps

[Allybye]

Cannot really comment on Reaper settings but.....

Is there anything else taking processor time? Other progs, wide area network, housekeeping, some real time virus checking....

Not having audio sources on a usb bus at the same time as other devices mixing transfer protocols?

Not suggesting you have not considered those aspects or thst they sre issues for you.....

[bigtop]

i7 8th gen 6 core laptop, with 32GB RAM and an SSD drive is a real weapon of a machine and should be capable of running pretty much anything. If you are only getting these issues with one particular plugin, then maybe the plugin.

[jrk]

Originally Posted by Dork Lard

I used to have all my drums inside a "Drums" Bus, but that would always reduce the volume for some reason and I'd a have much easier time just having each drum track separate on its own and it worked better that way.

That's not right?

(n + m) * 1 = n + m

surely?