Why is Cakewalk favoring core 1 so much?

[RexRed]

I have 18 cores intel extreme i9, load balancing is on and Cakewalk seems to be favoring core 1 such that the other cores are barely moving and core 1 is maxing out.

I have about 8 instances of waves vocal rider in various track effect bins, and ozone 10 in the master effect bin.

I am using convolution reverb parallel in a master bus and a lot of instances of ozone imager, why is core 1 so busy in Windows 11.

Is there a way to manually manage load balancing?

Core 1 is maxing out even when the project is not even playing anything.

 

 

  

 

[RexRed]

This is my meter when I am not even playing the song.

[Lord Tim]

If I remember rightly, some processes need to be all run on the same thread (Noel is the expert here, I'm sure he'll be along to school me if I'm wrong!), and these will be active even if the project isn't actually playing at all - if you turn off the audio engine or disable the effects this stuff will go away.

Have a look here to see if Plugin Load Balancing might help: https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR&language=3&help=NewFeatures.017.html

Like I said, sometimes things need to run in the one thread so it might not actually help things. Definitely worth a shot!

[RexRed]

From the Sonar documentation (I assume it is the same for CBB)

"When enabled, SONAR will attempt to load balance FX Racks that contain two or more unbypassed plug-in effects, including track FX Racks, bus FX Racks, clip FX Racks, FX Chains, ProChannel FX Racks, and ProChannel FX Chains"

From what this seems to say to me is if you have a second effect in your bus/rack/chain/bin Sonar will send that effect to another core.

My problems is I have only one effect each in a lot of tracks so they are all being sent to core 1.

The balancing is done on a, per effect in rack, basis but it seems it is not done on a per track basis.

I don't think load balancing is even working when unbypassed effects are in a single bin.

I contacted Izotope and they said that their plugins should work with load balancing but that does not seem to be the case.

Edited March 17, 2023 by RexRed

[mettelus]

I forget now if the Core 0 display reflects system usage or not. Even if it doesn't, so much software is scripted for single core (all computers have a Core 0), so the processing available on that core will always be lower (a chunk of it is being used by the system). Background processes would also be good to check, but Noel could give a definitive answer here.

[msmcleod]

The first core is almost certainly the UI thread, which explains why it's the most busy.  This thread is responsible for all UI updates and the majority of notifications. 

The fact that you do have activity in the other threads would indicate the effects are being load balanced.

[Chris-J]

Try turning LoadBalancing to OFF.

sometimes it makes Core balancing worse. 
I usually leave it off, it seems to balance better that way.

Edited March 17, 2023 by Chris-J
Added info

[RexRed]

On 3/17/2023 at 8:34 AM, msmcleod said:

The first core is almost certainly the UI thread, which explains why it's the most busy.  This thread is responsible for all UI updates and the majority of notifications. 

The fact that you do have activity in the other threads would indicate the effects are being load balanced.

Would Windows background tasks also not favor that thread? Is there a way to have the UI favor a different thread?

Also, I had a notification in my Windows defender area and it wanted to do some sort of ram thing where it put items in a protected mode.

This seems to have helped putting that on.

I also put a lot of effects that would seems sensible before the pro channel instead of in the bins after the track.

[msmcleod]

3 hours ago, RexRed said:

Would Windows background tasks also not favor that thread? Is there a way to have the UI favor a different thread?

No, because they're running as different processes... but they could be running on the same core.

[Glenn Stanton]

Process Lasso ? 

[RexRed]

1 hour ago, Glenn Stanton said:

Process Lasso ? 

Thanks for that tip Glenn, I have never heard of that program, I installed it and it is very helpful!

[hockeyjx]

6 hours ago, RexRed said:

Thanks for that tip Glenn, I have never heard of that program, I installed it and it is very helpful!

Be curious what you discovered on your machine.

[RexRed]

55 minutes ago, hockeyjx said:

Be curious what you discovered on your machine.

Well, it is kind of a long story.

I will condense it as much as possible.

I am not sure what makes one core race as much.

Sometimes it is terrible.

I suspect is it plugins. Some plugins are buggy with Cakewalk, I do not blame Cakewalk for this because other plugins are perfectly fine no matter how many instances I have of them.

For instance, Isotope Nectar, do not place it in a FX rack pre pro channel. During mixdown rendering Cakewalk would crash. 

I removed the two instances of Nectar from the FX rack and Cakewalk rendered fine.

Nectar is buggy in Cakewalk in general (I could go into more detail but...)

And the thing is with Nectar, I was turning off all of the internal apps except the live tuning one which I have grown fond of.

In the windows front, I did not realize I could track CPU usage in the task manager even though I have seen the monitors thousands of times.

My latest version of Windows 11/ Office 365 has a startup of Microsoft teams (that can be problematic, I have thousands of contacts).

Also windows widgets can be problematic shut them off and anything else that is not critical.

Once everything is shut off then it is a matter of getting Cakewalk's own footprint to be as light as possible.

I have a RME Fireface UCX II and it has a lot of ADAT and other ins and outs that I never use. Shut them off so Cakewalk does not load them.

Then it comes down to the dilemma of plugins, I have perhaps a thousand of them.

Many of them I never use at all. I am not sure of how or if they load into memory and to what extent.

I would assume they have no memory impact unless they are used but I could be wrong about that.

Why have them resident if they will not be used? 

Having them resident also gives way to the possibility of conflicts between each other and Cakewalk itself and then there is the whole 32-64 bit thing and emulation running in the background.

Why not disable plugins that you don't ever use?

Are there any other ways to lessen Cakewalk's CPU footprint?

Post your ideas here please.

Sometimes I work all night in Cakewalk while I am dreaming and that does not take up any CPU cycles at all... ?

Ozone 10, having all of these apps within one plugin, one wonders how good the load balancing is in those instances. Would it not be better loading each app separately into a bin and letting Cakewalk handle the balancing? The answer to that is beyond my skill. 

Also I use Waves Vocal Rider a lot, in some projects I might have ten instances of it. So far it seems to do well.

But it only takes one buggy track with a corrupted clip in it and a floating pointer situation arises and finding the culprit is nearly impossible.

We must mention Windows Defender scans here as well.

And One Drive uploading, each time you hit ctrl S, sending your project all the way to Redmond WA.

Edited March 20, 2023 by RexRed

[Jean]

On 3/17/2023 at 4:28 AM, RexRed said:

I have 18 cores intel extreme i9, load balancing is on and Cakewalk seems to be favoring core 1 such that the other cores are barely moving and core 1 is maxing out.

I have about 8 instances of waves vocal rider in various track effect bins, and ozone 10 in the master effect bin.

I am using convolution reverb parallel in a master bus and a lot of instances of ozone imager, why is core 1 so busy in Windows 11.

Is there a way to manually manage load balancing?

Core 1 is maxing out even when the project is not even playing anything.

 

I’m having the same problem. One core is basically maxing out. It’s a new computer and I’m trying to work out what’s going on before I get in touch with the supplier. I’ve been experiencing spikes. For example, earlier today, I opened CbB and all was well, but when I inserted around eight empty audio tracks, the one core started to rise dramatically. I opened a project which had around 30 tracks (all audio), 10 busses with, say around 50 plugins. The project played without dropouts, but that one core (core 17 I think?) was in the red and stayed there when I closed the project. Disabling the plugins in the project made no difference.

I’ve only just seen this thread, so will investigate some more tomorrow.

RME Fireface 802 (I run it via firewire, but will try USB tomorrow) ASIO

2 UAD Octo USB satellites

ASUS Z790-A WIFI

INTEL i9 13900K - 24 Core, 3.0 GHz (13th Gen)  

64Gb DDR5 5600Mhz Kit

Nvidia GTX1650  

Windows 11 Professional 64Bit

Any help appreciated!

[Glenn Stanton]

one thought is check and see what processes are running - like Defender etc which can be a problem anyways, so exclude cakewalk etc from the live scanner.

[Jean]

Thanks Glenn.

A bit of a breakthrough, I think. I completely removed the native UADx (Spark) plugins. I remembered that there had been issues around them causing spikes a while back, although the problem had supposedly been resolved a few weeks ago with an update. I had the latest update installed (the only one available anyway as my computer is new) So on a hunch, I uninstalled them including the UAD Connect app and the spiking has lessened and the CPU returns to normal after the project is closed. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but it seems to have helped. UAD-2 plugins still work flawlessly so I don’t really need the UADx versions and they are free anyway as I have UAD hardware.

I’ll see how things go.

[Billy86]

On 3/20/2023 at 1:35 PM, RexRed said:

For instance, Isotope Nectar, do not place it in a FX rack pre pro channel. During mixdown rendering Cakewalk would crash. 

The last update of Nectar 3, Izotope has acknowledged, has a known problem issue with CW. Roll back to the previous version and it works fine here. Hopefully they fix the issue in the next update. 

[Jean]

Another update.

There were certain plugins causing a major core spike and I think I’ve narrowed it down to something to do with Open GL. I have no idea of the ins and outs of Open GL (except that it’s something to do with graphics), but some plugins have an option in their settings to enable or disable this feature. Since I’ve been doing a clean install with the latest versions of plugins, it would seem that some have ‘Use Open GL’ as their default. A few plugins in this category I’ve discovered so far which have this are Soothe 2, Spiff, Soundradix. On my computer, these plugins work fine if Open GL is disabled in settings, but if enabled cause one core spike to shoot up into the red.

Also, Leapwing Audio’s Dynone with the latest version, causes the same spiking behaviour. I therefore downloaded an earlier version prior to the point where Open GL was implemented (according to their website release notes) and the issue disappeared.

Another culprit was SSL Native X-EQ2, which didn’t seem to have the option to disable Open GL (I’m assuming it does use Open GL, but, of course, I can’t be sure)

But worth mentioning too is that when this plugin was deleted from the project, the spike remained until I completely closed CbB and reopened.

Not sure if the UADx plugins use Open GL or not. At some point I’ll try reinstalling them but I’m just thankful to have my new computer working as it should now.

Hope that’s of help if anyone else is experiencing the same issue.

[tulamide]

2 hours ago, Jean said:

Another update.

There were certain plugins causing a major core spike and I think I’ve narrowed it down to something to do with Open GL.

That seems to indicate, there's something wrong with your drivers (outside of the music world). You have a GTX 1650, which not only runs OpenGL just fine, it also takes away the load from CPU threads busy with GUI stuff.
Make sure you have the latest drivers, installed manually, not via Windows! That goes especially for your graphic card.

FYI, OpenGL is an API, just like DirectX or Vulcan. The app just instructs the graphic card using this API, and all the graphic work is taken away from the CPU and brought to the graphics card. That you have a better performance with plugins' OpenGL disabled points to a software renderer used (which is done, when no graphic card is found). But a software renderer for OpenGL is actually more demanding than just using GDI+ (the normal software rendering, Windows uses).

[Jean]

Hi Tulamide

Thanks for your reply.

I downloaded and installed the latest drivers today (from Nvidia) but the same situation still occurs. When Open GL is enabled in the plugin settings, the spike into the red happens (core 11 I think) and stays when I close the project. I’m not too concerned about it as when I disable Open GL in the settings, everything is fine. It might just be something particular to my computer set up.