Modest project uses 9 Gb of RAM

[jkoseattle]

Why is this project of 3 minutes in length with about 20 midi tracks and 3 audio tracks consuming 8-9 Gb of RAM, bringing my entire PC to a crawl? Obviously you can't know, but how can I go about troubleshooting this?

[jkoseattle]

Also, and I don't know if this is related, but lately CW just out and shuts down on me maybe a couple times a week. It's not crashing exactly, not freezing, no warning in terms of messaging or behavior, it just plain old shuts down completely. and I go into Task Manager and by Jove, it's really gone.

I'm not doing anything unusual afaik. This last time, (the 8-9 Gb of RAM had dwindled down to 4-5 Gb, still a lot for this modest project), I had turned off FX and reduced the buffer size to reduce recording latency for a rhythmically challenging bit. So with the aforementioned dimensions of this project AND with FX disabled, CW still up and just closed on me. 

[mettelus]

With that amount of RAM used, first guess would be that you are using VSTis that are loading sound banks into RAM. That unto itself is not bad since RAM is faster than pulling data from a drive, but if it is more RAM than the machine has, you could also be pulling from disc anyway if it is using the pagefile as "RAM." Have you tried saving a copy of the project and freezing the VSTis? Even with some rather intense FX going on, that would remove the streaming/RAM issue. A quick check of enabling the Global FX Bypass would also let you know if you have a rogue plugin giving you grief. Your situation seems more like a CPU/processing issue rather than RAM (barring the pagefile possibility), so I would start with bypassing FX, then see if freezing synths does anything for you as a start.

[Promidi]

Please list every plugin effect and synth (and presets) used in this project.  Without this info, it might as well be cosmic rays.

[msmcleod]

It's almost certainly down to one of your synths - probably a sample-based synth with a huge sample library.

Most "library" based synths have the ability within the plugin itself to limit the amount of memory used and/or load samples on demand, so samples are loaded on when they are needed rather than loading everything into RAM.   

Loading samples on demand will not only save RAM when using the synths, but will speed up project loading time significantly.   The downside is that there may be a delay in loading the samples on first playback - i.e. you may need to play your project once all of the way through to ensure every sample used is loaded into RAM.

Kontakt for example can not only be configured to limit memory/load on demand, you can also "purge" the samples, effectively emptying the memory of any unused samples.

You'll need to consult the documentation for the synths in question to see where these options are.