How many plugins have you loaded at once?

[FredProgGH]

Update!

I got hold of a Dell laptop as a backup machine. Thing is a freaking boat anchor- heaviest laptop I’ve come across in my life. But it has a larger display, 16Gb RAM vs. the Asus’s 12, the processor seems to actually benchmark faster even though it’s clocked slower and is a couple generations older and- it has an SSD drive! So, instead of transferring that drive to the Asus like I originally planned I’m using the Dell as #1 and the Asus is now the backup.

But anyway- long story short: 11+ minute load is now about 40 seconds. SSDs are SWEET.

[Organist]

@Torsten

I have a meager 82 plugins in my standard setlist for my band. Loads in about 45 seconds, even without an SSD disk (but I use only very few large sample sets).

How do you manage to load these huge amounts of plugins?

I am now almost at the despair. Today I made the following test: I loaded 28 instances of Kontakt 6 WITHOUT sounds. At the beginning the system load looked like this:

After about 15 minutes the system load looked like this:

As I said; there were not even sounds loaded!
How can a Gigabyte Z690 UD AX with i5-12600K, 3700 MHz with 32 GB RAM and Windows 11 Home reach its limits so quickly?

What am I doing wrong?

[Torsten]

Hmm, this looks strange - what is going on below “Kontakt 20”? Just adding up the numbers for the first 13 instances doesn’t get near full load - with each instance creating a max load of 1.1 to 1.8%, 28 instances shouldn’t get to 130%…

Could it be that each Kontakt instance reserves some RAM for caching samples, so that once the instances add up, they exhaust the available RAM and start swapping memory pages to and from disk all the time? That could also explain the massive amounts of page faults and the huge size of your “Memory” and “Working Set” RAM consumption.

My live set is now at 178 plugins, but its memory footprint is just 10 GB; far lower than your Kontakt monster song.

You should definitely look at the Kontakt memory setup

Cheers,

Torsten

[Organist]

Hello @Torsten,

thanks for your reply. I can’t find anything to set in Kontakt that would help. It also doesn’t matter which plugin I use: Kontakt, Halion6, UVI Falcon… The effect is always the same: As soon as I load a larger number of instances, the RAM consumption increases linearly, even if I don’t do anything and get a coffee:

At some point the sound starts to crackle and rattle.

It is also strange that the consumption of RAM does not decrease when I load a new, empty song. Time Load and Page Faults go back, but Memory and Working Set do not. The Task Manager shows the same values. I have to quit Cantabile first to empty the RAM again.

I did the same experiment from my last post with the same plugins on the same PC with GigPerformer. Now the RAM consumption remains constant.
Here I can load 16 instances of UVI Falcon with eight different (large!) libraries each without any problems and without reaching my limits.

Therefore, I suspected that the error lies in some “hidden” setting in Cantabile.

[Torsten]

Hi there,

just gave this a try out of interest and loaded 16 instances of Kontakt (6.7, VST3) in my trusty LiveCube - and I managed to overload this system (time load > 100%) without even loading a sound or playing a note - that’s nasty; not a very efficient plugin if it has this kind of a base-load.

Plus, I could watch over time how the memory consumption increased steadily - it looks like Kontakt keeps claiming memory again and again, and Cantabile has no way to get it back. That could explain why your memory and working set numbers explode so dramatically over 15 minutes…

Another funky observation: I deleted just one instance of Kontakt from that song and suddenly the time load went down from 105% to 45%. So 16 instances of Kontakt manage to completely block my system, while 15 instances work without a problem.

But the memory grabbing keeps going up and up; removing that one plugin didn’t help at all; in fact, the memory grab seems to speed up!

This looks like a problem for @brad - since it is so easy to reproduce, there should be a way to find out why this behaves so strangely.

Another interesting observation: I deleted all instances of Kontakt, and the memory usage dropped a bit (but not significantly) - and then kept on increasing! Not at the same pace as with the Kontakt instances loaded, but still steadily!

Re-started Cantabile and left it empty - no more memory grab…

So it looks like the many Kontakt instances left something in memory that keeps grabbing more, and that Cantabile can’t get rid of - that’s pretty shocking!

I have pretty much removed Kontakt from my active projects - it’s just not an efficient VSTi for live use.

Just for comparison, I just loaded 16 instances of Korg Triton Extreme - 70% time load when not playing, and no memory creep at all… Also, Triton seems to be giving most of the memory back when removing the loaded instance from the song.

Looks like Kontakt and Cantabile don’t really get along when it comes to managing memory - maybe @brad can make something of this?

Cheers,

Torsten

[brad]

Thanks Torsten… I’ll check it out.

[drawbars]

You can do anything to a shared rack that can be done to a song, more or less. I have a rack that has four copies of Chipset OPS7, each with a pair of stereo outs. A new shared rack starts with one MIDI in/out pair and an audio in/out pair (quad?), but additional ins and outs can be added to the rack. I use four consecutive MIDI channels on the input, and have renamed the audio outs as “CH10 Out,” “CH11 Out,” etc. to keep them straight. There’s nothing to prevent adding an output that takes a signal from somewhere in the middle of a VST chain, either.

Shared racks make a huge difference. I started out with a set list with ~45 songs, requiring 118 VSTs to load! I’ve added 10-15 more songs, but the total VSTs is now 42. In addition to reduced CPU load and memory use, they also have another benefit: Cantabile load and unload times. My 118-VST mess used to take about 75 sec. to load, and maybe 25-30 sec. to unload. My 42-VST version takes 25 sec. on the way in, and about 8 sec. on the way out. Nice to know, in case something were to go wrong on a live gig!

Regards,
-BW

[ukm]

With my main project I have about 60 songs with 64 plugins.
Loading time is 10 - 15 seconds since I don’t use sample libraries much.

[luigi]

244 here… setlist loads in few minutes (i have an SSD)

[Organist]

What I need is just the opposite: As many VSTs as possible in only ONE rack. I would rather call it a kind of “Shared Song”…

I need many instances of the same plugin (UVI Falcon) because I can load UVI libraries as well as sfz soundfonts. This causes problems when the number of used instances exceeds a certain level.

[drawbars]

That can certainly be done. I tried it myself, but the memory use (22GB+) and load times (> 60 sec.) did appeal to me. YMMV.

[Organist]

@luigi
How many of them are instruments and how many are effects? How many of the instruments are sample based, virtual modeling based or synthesizers?

[luigi]

Ciao @Organist
for each song I usually have

• 3-6 Kontakt instances (this simplifies my routing , with respect to using 1 with multiple channels)
• 2-5 synth-like vst (mainly Diva, Korg M1, Sampletank)
• sometimes one arpeggiator and mediaplayer (for intros)
• eq plugins on ~half of the vsts above
• one mixer rack that downmixes everything to one stereo pair (this uses several instances of reajs)
• final compressor/limiter, reverb

that’s it

[Organist]

@brad

Thanks Torsten… I’ll check it out.

@brad

I have now made a test with version 4127, and the issue with memory seems to be less significant here.

As an experiment, I loaded eight instances of UVI Falcon, each with 16 sounds (some of the sound libraries used are quite large). I then saved this entire setup as a song and loaded it again. It took a few minutes for the entire song to load, and the following emerged:

Then, I waited for about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. The RAM usage only increased by about 150 Mb, which is far from the steep increase it once had.

I then deleted two instances of UVI Falcon,

followed by deleting two more instances,

and again, two more instances.

Finally, I deleted only one instance.

From the remaining instance, I removed all sound libraries

and then deleted that instance as well.

Approximately 1 GB of RAM usage remained, which only disappeared when I restarted Cantabile.

So it seems that the problem is not as pronounced anymore, but it’s not entirely gone yet?

[Tim_Starace_YYNOT]

I’m embarrassed to say I have 172 instances in a 20+ song setlist.

[avromero]

This thread confirms that I must be doing something wrong. My ideal setup is to have a USB mixer like the nanokontrol and then use the mute buttons on each channel to suspend/enable different plugins and then use the silders to control the volume levels. If I load more than 8 VSTs, even if most are suspended, I start getting crackling and poor performance…so how are others getting 100+ plugins loaded? Am I not disabling or suspending the ones that I’m not using at the moment correctly? I have resisted using different states so it is just a flexible setup, if we do a song with strings I just “unmute” my strings plugin and raise the volume to whatever. I haven’t tried using racks but am not doing anything with effects, just using straight plugins.

My main “song” that I load has 6 Kontact instances, 1 unify instance, and one Philharmonik instance.

My laptop isn’t the best but isn’t bad:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 4800H 2.9ghz
RAM: 16gb
2 SSDs (3TB total space) : one with read speeds of 1802 MB/S, one with read speeds of 1792 MB/S

Audio Interface: Focusrite 4i4 gen 2

I’m really at a lose as to why I can’t load more than 8 plugins when others are loading 100+…I mean your computer specs can’t be that much better. Is this an audio interface issue? I keep thinking about upgrading to the motu m4 or breaking the budget and getting an RME babyface but I can’t imagine the audio interface is what is causing the issue here.

Andrew V. Romero

[Ade]

@avromero

. If I load more than 8 VSTs, even if most are suspended, I start getting crackling and poor performance

This is crucial to establishing what you are really demanding from your system. Kontakt can run instruments which easily bring a reasonably well spec’d system to its knees. What we need to know is exactly what you are running within those Kontakts which are running.
Also, we need to establish for sure your plugins are suspended or bypassed.