# Performance to be expected from SSD for Spitfire



## Gerhard Westphalen (Jan 1, 2017)

Yesterday I started mocking up "Test Drive" from HTTYD and started to get severe note dropping. It's the first time I've tried mocking up something this dense on this computer. I'm only using Spitfire libraries for this and my strings, woodwinds, and brass are each on separate SSDs. The note dropping is worse with the strings. Sometimes the strings will drop out almost completely and if I stop after playing I can hear all of the releases getting chopped. CPU usage isn't an issue. It's barely breaking a sweat. I can, however, see the disk meter in Kontakt going to the red 100%.

I've had my DSD setting at 12kB which I've heard should be fine for an SSD (some people even using 6kB). I tried going up to 18kB but that didn't change much. I can't go any higher as my template at 18kB takes up 54GB in my 64GB computer.

Adding up the voice counts on my string Kontakt instances gets to around 400 when it's dropping. Can an SSD not handle 400 voices?

For now I can turn off the close mics so that I'm only streaming 2/3 of the voices but I thought an SSD should be handle it. It seems like the only workarounds would be to either get more ram so that I can have a higher DSD setting or split Mural into several SSDs.


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## JohnG (Jan 1, 2017)

Hi Gerhard,

Good for you to mock up such a wonderful score!

My first question, one you've already addressed somewhat, is to ask how many mic positions you're using. Multiple mic positions for full orchestra from a single computer with only 64 GB of RAM is ambitious for such a busy piece, no matter what else you try to change.

So you may be stuck right off the bat. It may be that the only way to be truly satisfied is to have a second computer devoted to strings.

But to stay with your current setup, another issue could possibly be -- this is something of a wild guess -- that your SSDs are plugged into SATA II ports instead of SATA III. Can you check that? 

Either way, you might conceivably benefit from a low-cost add-on of a PCIe card that has SATA III ports on it. The idea is that you put the PCIe card into one of your slots near where the graphics go in, and plug your SSDs into it. Then you are accessing not only SATA III ports but also the PCIe bus, which accommodates much more data than the SATA bus.

Honestly, I am not sure that either faster ports or a PCIe card would make enough of a difference to really make you happy. An extra computer, I would think, is much more likely to solve the problem decisively. I know 64 GB is a lot but with the glory of some of the libraries today, it is amazing how fast one uses it up.

Kind regards,

John


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Jan 1, 2017)

JohnG said:


> Hi Gerhard,
> 
> Good for you to mock up such a wonderful score!
> 
> ...



I thought I'd start with something that I already have the score to before getting back into transcribing to do pieces like Buckbeak's Flight.

My computer only has sata III and I've heard that faster drives like m.2 and PCIe drives don't increase the number of voices as the slower sustained read/write of a normal SSD isn't the bottleneck.

I think it all comes down to what DSD setting I can use. It doesn't matter how much ram or how many computers I have if it's the DSD settings. Right now my template fits with 3 mic positions in 37GB when the setting is at 12kB. If 12kB should work then getting more ram or more computers won't make any difference. I do have several old slaves I no longer use but putting my strings on that at 12kB wouldn't make a difference. And again, processor power isn't an issue. The asio meter in Cubase moves about 1/16 from sitting idle to playing the most dense passages. The meter in VEP stays at around 20%.

So it goes back to the question of is 400 (that's including all of the mic positions) voices at 12kB too much to expect from an SSD? There seems to be a lot of forum posts and posts from sample developers saying that 12kB should be fine for an SSD. At this rate it seems that you'd need the Spitfire strings on their own dedicated SSD at around 36kB to handle using 3 mic positions with this sort of writing. That seems a bit absurd. 

Edit: I do have a 10Gb/s sata express and 10Gb/s m.2 slot which is capable of a 32Gb/s turbo but I doubt getting drives for those would offer a meaningful boost.


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## rgames (Jan 1, 2017)

I just started using Spitfire strings/ww and the performance legato patches need more buffer than just about anything else I've run across in Kontakt. I'd say there's room for improvement on the scripting.

I found the individual patches to be much better performers (roughly equivalent to Cinebrass) but still not on par with, say, LASS. I can get something like 700 voices before I get crackles at a buffer of 128+128. LASS wil do around 1500 at the same buffer setting.

I'll add my usual request for developers to license the VSL VI player 

rgames


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Jan 1, 2017)

rgames said:


> I just started using Spitfire strings/ww and the performance legato patches need more buffer than just about anything else I've run across in Kontakt. I'd say there's room for improvement on the scripting.
> 
> I found the individual patches to be much better performers (roughly equivalent to Cinebrass) but still not on par with, say, LASS. I can get something like 700 voices before I get crackles at a buffer of 128+128. LASS wil do around 1500 at the same buffer setting.
> 
> ...



I'd say that less than half of what I'm running is legato and it's the older Mural legato which is a single legato patch instead of the performance legato combining the different legatos. I do also get dropping with the brass and ww which are each on their own drives but they don't happen as often as they're usually only using around 200 voices.

I'm not getting any sort of crackles or performance spikes, just notes dropping out cold. Whenever I press stop so that I can hear the reverb tails I hear each tail individually cutting out with a little pop. Whether or not I play only one orchestra section or tutti (probably over 800 voices altogether) has not effect on the notes dropping so I believe it is a bottleneck of each SSD. My RME buffer is at 512 and VEP is at 2.

What's your DSD setting at?


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## JohnG (Jan 1, 2017)

Gerhard Westphalen said:


> I do have several old slaves I no longer use



I use those for less-demanding orchestral sections, for what it's worth. Kind of a drag to set up but it frees up your fastest computer(s) for strings or other super-greedy sections.



Gerhard Westphalen said:


> If 12kB should work then getting more ram or more computers won't make any difference.



I'm not sure I completely understand this sentence, but if you mean that you don't have enough RAM in your one-computer setup to raise that buffer in Kontakt, then yes, I get that. I'm wondering, since you already own the computers, if you were able to off-load, say, the winds or choir or maybe some of the brass to a less-powerful slave computer, whether that would release enough RAM to allow you to raise the buffer for the strings?


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Jan 1, 2017)

JohnG said:


> I use those for less-demanding orchestral sections, for what it's worth. Kind of a drag to set up but it frees up your fastest computer(s) for strings or other super-greedy sections.
> 
> 
> 
> I'm not sure I completely understand this sentence, but if you mean that you don't have enough RAM in your one-computer setup to raise that buffer in Kontakt, then yes, I get that. I'm wondering, since you already own the computers, if you were able to off-load, say, the winds or choir or maybe some of the brass to a less-powerful slave computer, whether that would release enough RAM to allow you to raise the buffer for the strings?



I'm basically just trying to figure out whether it should be working of if I'm expecting too much from a single SSD for these strings. 

I really don't want to go back to using multiple computers (just a matter of principle and moving forward with technology). I'd be able to offload almost everything except strings and then have a super high DSD setting on this computer and basically have the entire samples in ram with no streaming. I could get 128GB on this computer but considering that I rarely mock up something like this, it's not worth the $1000. I think if I need a performance boost I'll either get more SSDs and split the strings (so I can keep the same DSD and ram usage), raise the DSD and make my template fully modular so that I only enable what I need, or see if I can do without the close mics. I need to use the ambience mics for my surrounds which I do instead of just reverb (another matter of principle). 

Another option (and probably the best, although very time consuming) would be to turn off the global DSD overwrite setting and then set the settings individually for every patch. I'm not sure how much I could balance before I run out of ram since most of my template is orchestral stuff that I'd try to be raising the DSD for.


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## rgames (Jan 1, 2017)

Gerhard Westphalen said:


> What's your DSD setting at?


30 kB for the perf legato patches and 18 kB for everything else. They're running from a single SSD that does something like 500 MB/s.

One thing to try is to completely reboot after each time you change the buffer settings. I've found that Kontakt will often have pops/dropouts after tweaking the buffers but will run fine if you restart and reload.


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## rgames (Jan 1, 2017)

Also - I'm using only two mic positions. The scripting has an effect there also, so you might check out your voice counts with only two mics active.


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Jan 1, 2017)

rgames said:


> 30 kB for the perf legato patches and 18 kB for everything else. They're running from a single SSD that does something like 500 MB/s.
> 
> One thing to try is to completely reboot after each time you change the buffer settings. I've found that Kontakt will often have pops/dropouts after tweaking the buffers but will run fine if you restart and reload.



I'll try changing all of my longs to 30kB.

Using 2 mic positions helped but it's still happening a lot. I noticed that if I only have 2 legato violin parts going with nothing else and around 100 voices it's still cutting off the releases. The disk meter is even only showing 3% with no red 100%. I'm not sure what's going on.

Edit: I noticed that it happens even with just 1 patch and 1 mic position peaking at around 50 voices. It seems to only happen to the second violin legato patch. I think it's a bug in the patch. I'm not noticing it on other string legato patches. It's not a sudden drop but almost like a fade out which ends with a pop. I think it might be some sort of noise suppression in the patch to avoid a noise build up when you have a lot of voices going on and wit the second violins it's not working properly.


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## colony nofi (Jan 1, 2017)

A couple of quick questions - as this seems VERY similar to things I've come up against previously.
What DAW are you using - and what are you using to measure your CPU / Disk usage? 
I *doubt* the problem is your SSD. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but it more than likely has to do with the way different parts of your system are programmed (which you have no control over!)
So while kontakt settings might be able to help you somewhat, you may just be coming up against some limits of your computer / DAW - which are more than likely to be caused by the way the different pieces of software are written and interact with each other.

For example - you can get peaks with ASIO in cubase LONG before a CPU is running at 100% - even as low as 20%. This is normal for all computationally heavy software - its not easy to efficiently use all of a CPU all the time. Or strictly speaking, even possible.

It is possible to test though for not a lot of money. Indeed - do you have a spare small SSD you can throw in with just say your legato strings on it - and then measure any changes in performance?

One other random question - are you running loads of busses inside your DAW template? These place a lot more strain on your system than is sometimes immediately obvious. This one is easy to test by running a few different stress tests with different bussing setups but with the same "load" (be it instruments or cpu heavy plugs)

Welcome to a world of hurt. I still haven't managed to get 100% to the bottom of it all - and I've spent a great deal of $ trying to maximise performance. I've ended up freezing when necessary...

B.


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Jan 1, 2017)

colony nofi said:


> A couple of quick questions - as this seems VERY similar to things I've come up against previously.
> What DAW are you using - and what are you using to measure your CPU / Disk usage?
> I *doubt* the problem is your SSD. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but it more than likely has to do with the way different parts of your system are programmed (which you have no control over!)
> So while kontakt settings might be able to help you somewhat, you may just be coming up against some limits of your computer / DAW - which are more than likely to be caused by the way the different pieces of software are written and interact with each other.
> ...



I'm in Cubase with everything in VEP. I'm only looking a the disk meter in Kontakt which is peaking. I haven't used the windows performance recorded to analyze it in more detail...yet. I have around 200 busses from VEP and then it gets bussed down a couple of times in Cubase but again, there are no issues with asio peaks or high cpu usage shown in VEP or Kontakt. Yes, I have about 20 surround Altiverbs and other reverbs running but that has nothing to do with this as I never get any dropouts with the processing on those. And again, if I'm playing it tutti, I don't get more voices dropping in the strings than if I solo the strings so all of the processing power required to play all of the other parts has no impact on the dropping voices in the strings.


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## Dave Connor (Jan 1, 2017)

Turn off 'ext' which syncs Kontakt with your tempo track. That stops the show before it begins as far as clicks and pops etc.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jan 1, 2017)

200 buses on a single computer + 20 surround Altiverbs? That's all?!


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## rgames (Jan 1, 2017)

Gerhard Westphalen said:


> I noticed that if I only have 2 legato violin parts going with nothing else and around 100 voices it's still cutting off the releases. The disk meter is even only showing 3% with no red 100%. I'm not sure what's going on.


You're sure you have the voice limits set correctly in Kontakt?

As Dave says, Ext synch can cause that but I've only had that be an issue during record/playback with changing tempos. I've not had it be an issue with the sequencer stopped. East enough to turn it off, though.

And yeah, trying to do all that on one machine is probably pushing it. Do you get the dropouts with *only* those patches loaded? If you're adding the Spitfire instruments to an existing template then it might just be a case of those are the ones that pushed it over the limit.

And since you're running everything on one machine - another thing that can cause that behavior is pagefile usage. Try booting up and loading nothing else but those two legato patches and make sure your pagefile usage is zero when you test it. Remember that Windows will gladly dump stuff to the pagefile and then tell you that you have a bunch of free memory. I ran in to that problem while adding libraries recently.

rgames


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Jan 1, 2017)

rgames said:


> You're sure you have the voice limits set correctly in Kontakt?
> 
> As Dave says, Ext synch can cause that but I've only had that be an issue during record/playback with changing tempos. I've not had it be an issue with the sequencer stopped. East enough to turn it off, though.
> 
> ...



I think you missed the "edit" in the post you quoted. The tails dropping out seems to be a completely separate issue and a bug in the patch so you can disregard the comment as the 2 legato patches aren't hitting a limit.

Pulling my string midi into a new project and having only strings loaded gives my the same note dropping with the DSD still at 18kB. Just to be clear, these aren't dropouts in the audio stream, it's specific notes not playing or cutting out. The audio stream isn't being interrupted like with a normal processing power limit being hit.


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## colony nofi (Jan 3, 2017)

Hm, interesting indeed.
I'm wondering if you could PM me the "new project" you talked about (its just midi in a cubase project right?) I have all the spitfire strings, so would be interesting to see if I can discover anything from my machines here....


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## Dave Connor (Jan 10, 2017)

rgames said:


> 30 kB for the perf legato patches and 18 kB for everything else. They're running from a single SSD that does something like 500 MB/s.


You can't set Kontakt settings individually in VE Pro though right? You set them in stand alone and then that becomes the global setting for all instances within VE if I understand correctly. I've been trying to find an ideal settings for Spitfire Strings and Winds also.

Someone above said to set Kontakt to ALL cores as well but that doesn't seem like a good idea on the DAW machine running VE Pro.


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## JohnG (Jul 1, 2017)

Dave Connor said:


> Someone above said to set Kontakt to ALL cores as well but that doesn't seem like a good idea on the DAW machine running VE Pro.



That sounds right, Dave. The only computer where I assign all cores to an application are slave PCs with a single VE Pro instance hosting Kontakt and PLAY, which, naturally, gets all 4 or 8 or whatever cores are on the machine.


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## Parsifal666 (Jul 1, 2017)

I've decided that Spitfire is strange. Or my computer.

I have all the Spitfire stuff I own (quite a lot) on my Samsung SSD save for two, Albion One and Bernard Herrmann's OT. Windows 10, Cubase 8, Dell Inspiron 16 GB RAM. The libraries on SSD run really good, rarely any loading issues, etc.

The Albion One has been on my desktop since I bought it, and it really needs for me to buy another SSD card lol. I could make a sandwich waiting for it to load, particularly the big Strings patch.

Yet, I was completely baffled to discover the BHOT (a rather large library, I'll tell ya!) is just as fine on my desktop as the SF on the SSD. I'm not sure if this is evidence of the progress loading technology has made _since_ One, but it's happily freeked me out.


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## colony nofi (Jul 2, 2017)

@Parsifal666 - have you done a batch resave on your patches in Albion One?


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