Sudden problem with performance and audio buffer

[ancjava]

Hello.

First I have to say that the problems are on my second PC which I am using at home for some quick fixes when I am not in studio. I am not using audio interface with this but for small project it used to work with WASAPI shared untilow. Some days ago I experienced a drastic drop of performance. Projects with only few plugins, that used to work perfectly smooth now are stuttering and the audio constantly runs out of buffer. I have no idea what on my PC may be causing that. Any ideas into what I should look to fix it? (sadly did not have system restore points turned on on this PC.)

[John Vere]

https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

[ancjava]

14 hours ago, John Vere said:

https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

I did three tests, one on iddle system, on on cakewalk running but no audio playing and one with cw and audio playing. Now i am even more confused - all three test seem to give good reports but during the playing of audio there were constant stutters resulting in moments of silence (moresoe - those moments of silence appear also in exported wav file). I am attaching all three reports cause maybe i am missing something in them.

 

raport cw playing.txt raport idle.txt report cw stopped.txt

[ancjava]

bumping this up. Problem presists

[ancjava]

Anyone? Can't seem to find any way around this and it DID work fine earlier

[John Vere]

Probably because really the only solution in this case is a second audio interface.

Not all onboard audio is the same I guess. It’s a hit or miss thing. I do what you are doing with my office computer. I like to write my tutorials with Cakewalk open and test plug ins so I load up large projects sometimes. Quality seems very limited when using the on board audio and I get crashes and drop outs so I connected my old Focusrite 6i6 and the weird issues all were gone.  

I also have a laptop that is much newer than my office computer and it can play all my projects with out issues using on-board audio. 

[bitflipper]

The LatencyMon test shows only that your problem is not being caused by deferred procedure calls (interrupt handlers). That's good, since such problems can be challenging to mitigate.

It means something else is hogging the CPU, I/O bus or memory. Assuming you haven't developed a new hardware issue, it suggests it's software that has recently entered into service, such as a newly-installed or recently-updated utility. Start with Task Manager, or even better, Process Explorer from SysInternals. Rank processes by CPU and note anything with a high number, then rank them by memory usage and look for processes that are using large amounts of RAM. These will comprise your initial list of suspects.

In your LatencyMon report, it identifies backgroundtaskhost.exe as the process with the most page faults. This is a Windows process that, as the name suggests, runs background tasks. If that's the culprit, it's not the exe itself, but something it's running in the background. Unfortunately, it's used for a bunch of Windows operations, including some that can't be turned off (e.g. Windows Updates).  But it does suggest that some background process might be contributing to your laptop's running out of steam.

Sorry I can't offer more specific advice. Performance analysis is a deep subject often best deferred to professional nerds. It might be worth your while to have a competent technician have a look. 

[RobertWS]

Resource Monitor  (resmon.exe) is also a good tool to find what is hogging the CPU and disks.

[bvideo]

On 3/26/2023 at 10:39 AM, ancjava said:

             ... moments of silence (moresoe - those moments of silence appear also in exported wav file)...

 

If exporting the wav file is done by non-realtime render or bounce, moments of silence are not likely caused by CPU exhaustion or anything about the sound card.

But what, I don't know.

maybe: Is there a master bus plugin that is not authorized on your home system?

Edited April 26, 2023 by bvideo
maybe...

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

Without knowing more about your system and which plugins you're using, it's hard to take educated guesses as to what it could be. It could be anything from a quirky plugin to some hardware failure that started to show up.