I’ve been having this issue with C3 where part way into a gig the processor starts jumping to like 600% and my piano VSTIs start cutting in and out. Unloading all my plugins and reloading them seems to make it better for a bit, but I can’t just do that between songs. I have about 16 plugins preloaded for the set list, but I’m only typically using just one when it does this, and it is always a piano VSTI. Made for a really rough spot in a gig last night.
Edit: I’m using a Surface Pro 4 i5/8GB/250GB. Issue occurs with various 88 Ensemble pianos and Kontakt based pianos. Never happens with Vintage Organs, Scarbee EPs or any other plugin. I always disable wifi for gigs, and have no other software running, including antivirus.
Download this and leave it running with Cantabile loaded and the offending VSTi’s active and see if it really is them or something else to do with disk access, for instance. (Not during a gig, I suppose!)
and it is telling me that my system seems to be having difficulty handling real-time audio and other tasks. This is running at 256 samples, giving me a 14ms output delay. I can’t add much more and still be playable, especially if I want round trip latency when I switch to guitar to be playable.
After that happens, hit the stop button in LatencyMon and switch to the “Stats” tab - it will likely identify the process that caused that high interrupt-to-process latency. If not, you’ll have to switch to the Processes or Drivers tab to see if you can spot it there.
Detective work! At least this tool makes it easy to see something is the matter.
FWIW, ACPI has to do with power management - is this an off the shelf laptop?
Also, 291 microseconds seems pretty high as “base rate” (though peak is more important), indicating there are probably some processes you can/should kill and some drivers to update.
I’d like to jump in here:
Yesterday I had LatencyMon running to see if there is something in the background that can cause glitches. And I found that wdf01000.sys causes high timing error.
My research on the internet was not sufficient. I just know that this driver belongs to windows… but I have no idea to get rid of that process…
Unfortunately that is sort of a container process for various drivers, that one can be really hard to troubleshoot. On the upside, it’s likely not the videocard, network or power management as they have distinct processes running them. On my laptop I get small remaining spikes of about 100 microseconds from touching my TouchPad. Fortunately very small, and my base rate is only about 30, but impossible to get rid of except by not touching it (or using an external mouse).
Try and see if you have any apps running in the background that you can eliminate or any “advanced control panels” to disable for your hardware. Also check for updated drivers where possible.
Question is, if some other background app was causing this, why wouldn’t the processor usage jump until i started playing a piano VST? It’s humming along at 10% and then suddenly it’s at 600%?
@BigTwisty It seems only disk-intensive plugins are doing this to you. (Kontakt pianos, 88 Ensemble pianos – Sample-based items with large sample libraries.) So, we should look at the Disk I/O and what might be spiking things when you perform disk access, I think.
I use a freebie called Process Explorer from the folks at TechNet at Microsoft to watch such things. It is a little bit more informative than Windows’ built-in “Performance Monitor” for me. Watching that while you hit those chords might reveal more to us. You can isolate different graphs by clicking the graph thumbnails across the top row. It uses a lot of right-clicking to move into details and such, btw.
Some useful tools have been mentioned on this thread. I’ve bookmarked them, ready for when I build that uber-PC in a month or so for Cantabile/VSTi use !
I agree with everything said above, but… are these glitches coinciding with page fault spike - as shown in Cantabile’s status panel “pf: xxx”. Wondering if this might be a memory related issue. What’s your memory load like?
As an example, I have an old Mac which is really struggling with the new OS X version, especially when multiple apps are open
But when you look at the performance tool, the processor cores are rarely anywhere near overloaded, it is always the memory that is under stress the most, so hopefully a RAM expansion will give the computer a new lease of life. 4GB was plenty once… And I think Page faults/swaps when the memory stress is why is what makes the computer slow down to crawl.
Surprisingly, (compared to what it used to be like), Firefox is proving to be a terrible memory hog. I may only have three or four tabs open (mostly text based sites like this one) and it can be using 1GB of memory! It seems to claim memory and rarely gives it up.
I thought it might still be an issue, since you have a Surface Pro that uses an SSD, if I am remembering correctly. I haven’t researched much further, but this might give you a starting point. (Article is from 2015…)
Yeah, 4GB RAM is supposedly just enough for the operating system these days, leaving little for apps and such!
Thanks for all the feedback, guys. Sorry I haven’t been able to respond.
@brad, I had page faults jumping up into the 4-6k range, and processor usage jumping up into the 600% range. Memory, according to C3, is 3646.6 GB, and I have 8 GB installed.
Edit:
I held the sustain pedal and ran up/down the keyboard. As long as I was pressing new notes the CPU usage spiked to close to 800%. As soon as I stopped, even with current notes playing on, the CPU usage went back to <50%.
I fear that disabling ACPI may brick my Surface, but 900us seems a bit excessive.
@Terry: That article tells me to look in Device Manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, which doesn’t exist in my Device Manager. Can I assume that to mean I don’t have the issue being described?
Yes. And if the sampler is using memory mapped files on the sample sets then they can trigger page faults when they’re accessed. ie: they’re related
@BigTwisty - can you confirm that by CPU you mean Cantabile’s load meter jumps to 600%. That’s actually not CPU load - it’s reporting time load which are both measures of load but not really related. (see here for more)
This sounds to me like the plugin is simply struggling to keep samples coming through quickly enough. Possible causes:
the disk is too slow,
you’re using a too demanding sample set. Is there a smaller sample set you can use, or can you trim the sample set to not include samples you don’t need.
does the plugin have internal buffer size settings. Perhaps bumping these up you can alleviate disk access pressure enough for it to work.
One other thing to check - make sure you don’t have multicore enabled in both Cantabile and the plugin.
Brad, I did indeed mean the Load percentage. Your link helped a lot. I’d hate to think that a single piano sample was overpowering my system (i5, SSD).
A while ago I used the “Rosewood Grand” from Orange Tree Samples. Although the sound itself is kind of charming, the voices will count up very very fast… also repeating one note over and over again blows up the voice-count. And the whole system began to crackle when playing arpeggios. When I looked into the library (Kontakt), it says iirc 1000 voices which is way too much… limiting this was the solution…
