How to assign Cakewalk to use all the CPU cores

[George D]

On 11/7/2021 at 5:18 PM, jackson white said:

@scook  thx, have had that setting in place since the initial release and make a point to send mini dumps if I have enough useful specifics leading up to it.

@George D  have you tried monitoring playback in console view to see if your  problem shows up as spikes on specific channels? I managed to track mine down to very repeatable events on specific channels with the existing project, but yet to "fix" it. Digging into MIDI events, patch/preset issues in the VST and VST channel routing in CxB.  Managed to eliminate most of the other potential suspects (Win update setting 'adjustments', clip boundaries, Izotope plugins, Korg M1, etc. and updated to the latest release 2021.11)

I have wondered about the engine as well, as I seem to recall being able to play "fast & loose" with editing during playback w/o much in the way of hiccups but finding this is no longer the case with MIDI sync dropping immediately and audio dropouts a close second. Tried changing the playback buffer settings, but nothing meaningful noted. fwiw, my problems seem to be limited to older projects getting revisited, newer ones seem to be running just fine.

@jackson white no. I haven't spikes on specifc channels. The load engine goes above 100% and then the spikes on sound appearing. Same time the cpu usage is at 55%....

[That_Guy]

I have a dual socket, AMD Opteron 6274,
32 core system running at 2.20Ghz 

56 Gigs of memory. 
*8Gb dedicated to each processor 
= 40Gb usable. 

512GB SSD "C" drive

Sometimes Plugins have been installed on "C" drive, 
other times installed on other SSD Drives to prevent bottle necks. 

 I've tried all the tricks here. 
+ Multiple sound cards/Multiple driver configs
+Multiple soundcards in multiple re-installs of windows. 
With and without updates. 

Audio drop out happens when I try play back of: 2 midi tracks, 
from one instance of:  Kontact 6 (In pic) 
(Also tried Kontakt 7)
through 3 "loaded" plug ins using less than 207 Mb of ram. 

Kontakt has been set to use 1 core -> 16 cores. 

Nothing resolves this.

Does using protools or other software help those of us,  with similar issues?

I've had this issue for years. 
Just started recording again. 
This is unbelievably frustrating. 

[Teegarden]

2.20Ghz is very low. The Opteron is a quite old processor. Older Ryzen processors are known to have some internal latency. Maybe the Opteron also suffers from that next to it being quite slow. Much higher clock speeds are preferred for DAWs. 

Did you run latencymon to check what could be the culprit?

Do you also experience problems when using other VSTs (recording, playing back)?

Do you have many background processes running?

Did you do all the important basic stuff like disabling power management on USB ports, WIFI etc.? See for example:

•  windows-11-pc-optimization-for-recording (Sweetwater)
• How-to-set-up-and-optimize-a-Digital-Audio-Workstation (Steinberg)
• unofficial-windows-10-and-11-audio-workstation-build-and-tweak-guide (Pete Brown from Microsoft who is also forum member)
• Optimizing-Your-Computer-for-Audio-Windows-10 (PreSonus)

   

Edited August 2, 2023 by Teegarden

[That_Guy]

For the next person W/ multicore DAW and having issues,
who stubles across this post...
I hope this info help you on your journey. 

LatencyMon reveals:
" DCP Routines that belong to a driver running in your system appear to be exciting too long."

  It has execution times that spiked while scanning USB,
But the failure got a lot worse when scanning ntoskrnl .exe

  Motherboard is a KGPE - D16 and has the latest bios and firmware.

However, I just saw it has SATA 2 and USB 2 slots. 

I suspect the plugins were trying to move atleast 200-300Mb/s of data, 
But the SATA 2 hard drives peak at 300mb/s max, under best circumstances. 

USB2 Peaks @ 480Mb/s under best circumstances.
But the data was getting pulled from Multiple USB drives on Multiple hubs and SATA 2 drives...
= Epic Fail. Of course the CPUS would spike...  = Audio drop out. 

Rather than accept a sinking feeling in my guts that I need to spend a few thousand on a new DAW... Im going to buy a SATA 3 PCIe card (Doubles speed of current hard drives) and a USB 3  PCI card (10x faster than USB2) to upgrade data transit speeds, try to cut ALL usb hubs out by investing in a "big" drive, instead of multiple USB driver...   grab a little bit more bandwidth. 

  I also hope to be able to record 4-6 live VST tracks as I write/record, then render/freeze them as I stack tracks? 

Also just remember: Driver updates are our friends. 

 

Edited August 3, 2023 by That_Guy

[msmcleod]

It's worth mentioning, that it's not possible to always use all cores all the time.

Depending on the routing of your project, it may or may not be possible to spread the load.  Some things have to be done in a certain order, which will inevitably mean that there will be bottlenecks in the chain.

On top of that, there are certain tasks that just can't be parallelised.  Some resources can't be shared, and some resources can be to an extent, but can only allow one process to have exclusive access at a time.  Context switching to give multiple threads access to resources adds additional CPU time, so in some cases it actually takes more time to spread the load that it would just letting a single thread do its thing.

CPU speed is the generally the biggest factor when processing plugins. Having multiple cores will help, but only in the situations where processing can actually be done in parallel.  Obviously UI and Audio Processing can be done in parallel (so a minimum of 2 cores is a must), but there are limits to what parts of the audio processing can be done in parallel.

As a simple analogy, you may be able to get 16 people to wash 16 mugs at the same time, but you can't get 16 people to wash the same single mug at the same time.

IMHO, a CPU running at 2.6Ghz with at least 4 cores is the bare minimum for any DAW.  Ideally you want 3.4Ghz or more.  I've certainly run Cakewalk on much less than this, but that's generally been for tracking only, and with no plugins.

[Simon Payne]

Solved it Cakewalk. Make your plugin chainer apply the vsts in parallel as apposed to series. They can then properly distribute the processing over multiple cores and threads. Until then Blue Cats Patchwork does the job. 

Edited August 10, 2023 by Simon Payne

[Glenn Stanton]

3 hours ago, Simon Payne said:

Solved it Cakewalk. Make your plugin chainer apply the vsts in parallel as apposed to series. They can then properly distribute the processing over multiple cores and threads. Until then Blue Cats Patchwork does the job. 

you could use Waves Studio Rack to create parallel also... but sometimes having the plugins serialized is the end goal... then again, when you have 16 cores and 11 are used at any one time -- is that a problem? ? 

[Simon Payne]

21 hours ago, Glenn Stanton said:

you could use Waves Studio Rack to create parallel also... but sometimes having the plugins serialized is the end goal... then again, when you have 16 cores and 11 are used at any one time -- is that a problem? ? 

no problem if your used to 15 cores reporting 1/4 capacity then you cpu meter max's out at 100%.