Spiking CPU Core Despite Load Balancing Active

[Neil Cummins]

Hi Forum,

                       I have 1/4 CPU cores spiking heavily in my CPU load monitor despite having Plug-In Load Balancing activated.

Could anyone suggest a possible reason for this and potential solution please?

Many Thanks

Neil Cummins

UK

[Jim Roseberry]

There are numerous potential reasons for a single core being under heavier load than the others.

• Not all processes in a DAW can be multi-threaded.  ie: Playing/monitoring in realtime using a 32-sample ASIO buffer size is not something that lends itself to being heavily multi-threaded.
• Some plugins don't use multiple cores (ie: UVI Falcon).  If you've got a heavy load running in Falcon it's going to result in one core being heavily loaded.

 

The lower the clock-speed on your CPU, the more single-core spikes will be evident.

 

 

[Jim Roseberry]

When using plugins like Falcon (that don't use multiple cores), you may achieve better performance using multiple instances... rather than a single instance playing all parts.  This would help spread the total load across cores.

[Neil Cummins]

Thanks Jim,

                            That sounds very accurate,given that I have a relatively low spec laptop with a slower clock speed.

All the plug-ins I'm using in this project are entirely TRacks5,so maybe there's a connection there.

 

BR//

Neil

 

[Jim Roseberry]

Hi Neil,

I've been using TRacks 5 plugins for a good while (in particular the 1176, LA2A, Pultec, Tape Delay, and Stealth Limiter).

FWIW, I haven't encountered any CPU load issues.

 

When choosing a CPU for DAW purposes, CPU clock-speed is the single most important factor.

Having more cores is beneficial... but not at the expense of significant clock-speed.

This is why Xeon CPUs (although expensive) aren't a great choice for a DAW.

[scook]

Also, keep in mind, even with the load balancing option enabled, it may not be used if the latency is set below MinPluginLoadBalancingBufferSamples in AUD.ini. The help goes into some detail about when load balancing is useful.