Odd sudden slowness-until-reboot recurring with CbB - troubleshooting advice appreciated

[Quinellipe Zorn]

Hi,

I have the latest CbB.  Perhaps since getting that, as it started happening recently (last couple months), without obvious proximate cause, that at some point after my PC's been running for "a while", however many days, CbB will suddenly become painfully slow in launching and doing any operations at all.  The easy and quick solution is to reboot.  Clears it up every time.

I'm not suggesting CbB is the cause; whatever the cause is, CbB appears to be the only symptomatic application.  There is no obvious plugin use or obviously distinctive activity or predecessor that triggers this.

Any advice on figuring out what may be the cause is welcome.  There's no obvious memory consumption problems, no overloaded processor.   Occurs whether the C drive has more or less data.  It typically occurs upon application launch, though most recently it became symptomatic upon opening another Cakewalk file whereas one was already open and performance had been just fine until opening the second file (and this file has no issues otherwise, and opens fine upon reboot or the like; also, yes, I can repeat the process within Cakewalk, but the symptoms will not repeat).

The only theory I presently have is that there's some sort of memory fragmentation that develops after startup, again no idea what application(s) might be the cause if so (Vegas across multiple recent releases would be a candidate; perhaps the most recent CbB), and at some point Cakewalk is struggling to properly address memory.  But doesn't seem so likely.  

Suggestions welcome.  Not a huge issue, just would be nice to resolve/make life a little easier.  Thank you!

[OutrageProductions]

CbB can be highly sensitive to the load in Standby Memory (that is not reflected in Active Load).

Are you using spinning drive(s) and have you looked at fragmentation lately?

What does Windows Event Viewer list in Admin Events when this happens/gets worse?

Any unusual activities in background processes or network traffic? 

Have you used an independent system monitoring SW to see when/where it bogs down.

Try Rammap.exe to clear Standby & Working Sets for emergency slowdowns. 

Edited May 19 by OutrageProductions

[Quinellipe Zorn]

Thanks for the suggestions, appreciated. 

Nope, no spinning drives left at least in terms of anything Cakewalk uses at all (external storage devices only, internal drives are both SSD).

I was thinking fragmentation be consistently symptomatic with other drive-hungry applications and, moreover, have some consistency in terms of when/what Cakewalk is loading?

Nothing seemingly relevant in Admin Events/nothing tied to when this happened again yesterday evening.

Nothing I see unusual.

Sorry, what sort of independent monitoring SW, to see which aspects in particular?

Will try, especially to see if it works even though the system has plenty of standby right now, for example, thanks.

[John Vere]

Samsung has a app called the Magician that will test your SSD drives. 
I had a slowdown issue about a year ago and turned out my data drive for Cakewalk was not running at specs at all. Turns out things like audio and video editing can max out the read/ write cycle these drives have. It was only 60 % used but super high on the cycling.
I cloned it using the app to a new better drive and my problem was solved.
Not to waist anything  I did a slow format and the old drive was good again so I used it in another computer.  

[Promidi]

What are your PC specs?

[Quinellipe Zorn]

On 5/19/2024 at 2:35 PM, John Vere said:

Samsung has a app called the Magician that will test your SSD drives. 
I had a slowdown issue about a year ago and turned out my data drive for Cakewalk was not running at specs at all. Turns out things like audio and video editing can max out the read/ write cycle these drives have. It was only 60 % used but super high on the cycling.
I cloned it using the app to a new better drive and my problem was solved.
Not to waist anything  I did a slow format and the old drive was good again so I used it in another computer.  

Would Cakewalk really be the sole application symptomatic (including editing/rendering video) if there were an SSD issue?  I do run anyway some "casual" diagnostics which haven't shown anything, but can do something more in-depth.  

[Quinellipe Zorn]

On 5/19/2024 at 4:02 PM, Promidi said:

What are your PC specs?

main stuff - 

Asus ROG STRIX B550-F motherboard
Ryzen 7 5800X CPU
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics card
Corsair RM850X power supply
Windows 11 Home 23H2
64 GB RAM

happy to answer more, thx

[Promidi]

Your PC kicks way more derriere than mine ever will, yet I am not having this issue. My PC stays on 24/7, sometimes with weeks between reboots.

Make sure the only thing your defrag tool is doing to your SSDs is TRIMMING.  Anything else will shorten its life.

Have you done a 4K alignment on your SSDs?

Have you tried disabling the Windows Prefetch (called SysMain in services), Superfetch and the indexing services?

Have you excluded all folders that have anything to do with Cakewalk from being scanned by any real time Antivirus / Antimalware programs?

[msmcleod]

The most common reason for this happening to me is Windows downloading updates in the background.

[Quinellipe Zorn]

Thanks, all, sorry for my late response!  Been busy with a trip and also was curious how long it would take for this to recur (which it just did after >2 weeks).

It *seems* tied to windowing issues, although as of this time I haven't seen any yet; but last time, I could see some window UI oddities at the same time.  I also note that it is very specifically hanging on two events in CbB:  "Start Screen" and only at the point where the main track UI panel finalizes/appears.  

To the above point re this PC's power, yes, hasn't been an issue until quite recently, sometime after the most recent CbB (but, again, I don't want to imply it's that, I'm just identifying general timeframes).

I don't run any defrags on these; stopped years ago even before pure SSDs as with contemporary drives and systems I found it stopped making any difference. 

I'm hesitant to do anything to the SSDs given CbB is the sole application manifesting any real issues (asides from aforementioned, perhaps-coincidental) oddities, and ease of restoration coupled with infrequent occurrence - especially considering whenever Cakewalk has this issue, there's no obvious issues going on with video editing and rendering, let alone any other applications.

Thx re RAMMap tip; I'll keep an eye.  I did clear memory just now, as you mentioned, @OutrageProductions, but to no avail/no difference.  Yes, there was a lot of memory in standby, but clearing it made no difference.

From experience, I'd rather leave Windows indexing services running on the current OS, if CbB is the sole application that suffers from it.   Disabling the fetching made no difference.

No Windows updates appear to be running (tho' good callout, have seen those cause other issues).

Thx re Magician, though the drives aren't supported for diagnostic scan.  Though no apparent issues at least re heat or other indicators.  As said, not too eager to do much on drives if only CbB suffers while my video stuff has no issues.