# Spitfire Chamber Strings Performance Legato Performance



## Moquan (May 12, 2018)

My machine is Cubase 9.5 on a 6600K i5 with 32GB ram running Windows 10 and 2 SSDs holding my samples.

I've recently been writing music with CSS and Cinebrass and some VSL Winds about 20 or so tracks total. Over all, my performance has been great for what I had been doing. I recently purchased Spitfire Chamber Strings and thought about trying to add it to an existing track for layering to see what it could do for the sound. I copied my CSS lines to the corresponding SCS performance legatos and tweaked the dynamic and performance differences as needed.

There is a section in my piece where the strings run up to a note. This instantly brought my computer to its knees after adding the chamber strings. I thought I might have just hit the max my system can do, but if I switch those parts over to duplicated CSS instances or non-performance SCS instances, not a problem. I took the violin one part out to a brand new project. While it doesn't bring it to its knees, just violin 1 playing that part was about 6% CPU 60-70% realtime CPU and 0% disk.

I looked online and saw previous questions like this in this forum and other places. In all the threads I saw, no one ever seemed to come back and say, "Aha! That was it!." I saw suggestions for setting minimum processor to 100% under power options. I changed my bios to not use the Intel processor ramping. I changed multi-processor usage in Kontakt and Cubase. I upped my preload in Kontakt. Nothing seemed to really change anything save for modifying my buffer. I should note the 60-70% real-time peak was after I changed my AISO buffer from 128 (worked fine previously) to 512. At 128 it was crackles and pops with just 1 violin part pegged at 100% real-time peak CPU. I have even engaged Spitfire support and they have been on the ball with responses with things to try, but nothing seems to hold the answer yet (and it's the weekend and this is nagging at me).

If I need to upgrade my rig (i7 with more cores) or get a secondary box for SCS, I can accept that. If I just have a weird toggle on somewhere, that would be great. If it's a usage of performance legato (e.g. don't do runs with performance legato) I can appreciate that as well. I am bothered by (shocked that) one instrument causing such a performance issue.

So my question is, do you all think I have a setup, hardware, or instrument usage issue? 

Thank you all in advance!


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## JohnG (May 12, 2018)

Just back the buffer off to 1024 or even 2048 to solve this kind of mix logjam. If that still doesn't do it, you could freeze or just go to audio. 

I mean, you're adding yet _another_ demanding string library to a bunch of tracks that are already being covered by other libraries. It's going to be pushing.

If you want a longer term solution you could get one of the new Intel Optane drives; I got one and that helps.


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## Moquan (May 12, 2018)

JohnG said:


> Just back the buffer off to 1024 or even 2048 to solve this kind of mix logjam. If that still doesn't do it, you could freeze or just go to audio.
> 
> I mean, you're adding yet _another_ demanding string library to a bunch of tracks that are already being covered by other libraries. It's going to be pushing.
> 
> If you want a longer term solution you could get one of the new Intel Optane drives; I got one and that helps.



Thought it might be a workflow issue (freezing to audio and such). For the Optane suggestion, would that indicate a disk I/O bottleneck then?


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## JohnG (May 12, 2018)

Moquan said:


> Thought it might be a workflow issue (freezing to audio and such). For the Optane suggestion, would that indicate a disk I/O bottleneck then?



Not necessarily. But you might be able to reduce your preload settings in Kontakt or something. Have you tried running Latencymon? there is a thread here about that and graphics cards.

Is there a sure fire, guaranteed "this will work" scenario? I doubt it.

Truth is, I am starting to believe that inconspicuous differences between systems sometimes can be decisive. For example, I've been through the BIOS on my PCs and turned off speedstep and a bunch of other processes that make sense for _most_ computer users, but are anathema to our real-time needs. I've also taken all the other measures that Steinberg and others recommend to speed things along. That takes my idle (no VE Pro or other regular programs running, Windows 10 only) computer CPU down to zero and Memory down to less than 5% on my Strings computer. 

So, good for me as long as nothing alters; change the motherboard or the amount of RAM or have a graphics card driver that causes a ruckus and you are in trouble with audio all over again.

Anyway. With that setup and Spitfire Symphonic Strings and HZ Strings on the Optane drive, I can run uninterrupted while composing at a 512 buffer. I don't have to think about hardware and can just focus on composition.

But if I have two or three mic positions, HZ strings and SSS and SCS and Hollywood strings (each with two or sometimes three mic positions) doing something crazy, I may still have choke points where I have to back the buffer off still further. 

Normally, such choke points only crop up after I've more or less finished writing, and am adding "one more line" to weave something dense. 

Some day we'll have magic computers that can do anything but in the mean time it feels like iterating to infinity.


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## jamwerks (May 12, 2018)

How many mic's do you have open ? Remember 3 mic's is 3 x the cpu & 3 x the ram.


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## Moquan (May 12, 2018)

jamwerks said:


> How many mic's do you have open ? Remember 3 mic's is 3 x the cpu & 3 x the ram.



Funny enough, the performance isn’t much different between just tree vs tree + ambient. Good call though!


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## Markus Kohlprath (May 14, 2018)

Did you disable the “ext” button in kontakt? This is responsible for the automatic synchronization from kontakt with the daw grid which you usually don’t need for strings. This can cause serious issues especially if there are any tempo changes. It is unfortunately enabled by default. This is always the first thing to do for me when I load a new kontakt instance.


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## Moquan (May 14, 2018)

I set my AISO buffer to 1024 and that brought down the real-time peak substantially. Still quite high (imho) for a single instrument (75 down to 25). I can consider this number useful. I have a 48ms delay with these settings.

As for the EXT option I *think *it had about a 3-5% improvement.

I really appreciate all of the suggestions!


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## ckiraly (May 14, 2018)

FWIW, I had a similar problem with Trailer Brass in Cubase - I'd play literally 2 notes and my CPU and disk would max out, snap, crackle, pop. I changed Kontakt to use the maximum number of cores as a VST plugin AND made sure "Activate Multi Processing" was enabled - something I had not done before. i didn't mess with any of the Kontakt Preload Buffers (which i probably could fine-tune). For me, all my problems went away.


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## Janos McKennitt (May 14, 2018)

Same here: had the same problem with Adventure Brass and with a full Sample Modeling Brass Section. Did the same thing Chiraly said: changed Kontakt to maximum cores - now everything works fine.


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## Moquan (May 23, 2018)

I've been tinkering around with this for about a week now. My 'bottleneck' does not seem to be processor related, but disk I/O. This is what's pegging on the Kontakt instance. Maybe I can try raiding my 2 SATA M.2 drives together in a striping fashion. Might be my next test.

I did find one odd thing that relieved a lot of the issue though. Instead of a single Kontakt instance running V1,V2,Vla,VC,DB performance legato intruments, I split it up into 5 Kontakt instances with one instrument each and I had about a 4x improvement in performance and none of the instances hit 100% disk use. I was also able to do this while moving the buffer down again!

Again, I really appreciate all of the thought and ideas you guys have put forth!


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## ckiraly (May 23, 2018)

Moquan said:


> I've been tinkering around with this for about a week now. My 'bottleneck' does not seem to be processor related, but disk I/O. This is what's pegging on the Kontakt instance. Maybe I can try raiding my 2 SATA M.2 drives together in a striping fashion. Might be my next test.
> 
> I did find one odd thing that relieved a lot of the issue though. Instead of a single Kontakt instance running V1,V2,Vla,VC,DB performance legato intruments, I split it up into 5 Kontakt instances with one instrument each and I had about a 4x improvement in performance and none of the instances hit 100% disk use. I was also able to do this while moving the buffer down again!
> 
> Again, I really appreciate all of the thought and ideas you guys have put forth!



Also, have you tried a Batch Resave on the library? It's helped me so many times in the past that I do it for all my new libraries before even trying to use them.


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## Moquan (May 23, 2018)

ckiraly said:


> Also, have you tried a Batch Resave on the library? It's helped me so many times in the past that I do it for all my new libraries before even trying to use them.



I have definitely batch resaved. The library loads lightning fast for sure!


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## thevisi0nary (Jun 25, 2018)

Please watch this video, it is extremely informative when it comes to cpu issues. 

. 

Apparently not all Cpu's and motherboards are rated well for real time performance, which is exactly the issue you are dealing with. 

My pc has an I7-4790k and 32gb ram, I use reaper and I have had projects with with 30 or so tracks, each with an unpurged kontakt instance and frequently use Chamber strings. Never have had this issue, I am only commenting that just to give you contrast. My cpu is older but I think Reaper is able to efficiently use all of the available cores well, but it may not even be an issue inherently related to kontakt. Purging samples only saves ram so it's not that either.

Have you checked the difference when not using Vsl? Possibly your daw is not making good use of your cpu? If you rule everything out and decide to upgrade anything, be sure to look at reviews for how well that piece of the computer rates for real time performance specifically when using it for audio. Good luck!


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