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Cubase Unresponsiveness/Slowness

benatural

Active Member
I work with a very large template and VEP. Two servers, and on local server on the same system as my master. The only VSTi's in my project are the VEP server plugins of which there are about 25-30, everything else is a midi track with a handful of audio tracks. I get no pops and clicks on playback, and latency is pretty low (though the problem I'm about to describe does seem to care about latency).

Here's the problem. Any time I relocate the play head, press play, edit a midi region, move a midi note, etc, I get a massive delay before Cubase actually performs the action. An example, when I press play there's a very long delay first, and then once it finally starts playing, the playhead stutters and starts and stops, even though I can HEAR playback just fine. Stopping playback is also very delayed.

I have noticed that if I connect less VEP instances that the problem goes away, but I've heard of folks with many instances and no problems, so is that really it?

Last thing, I've noticed that whenever I relocate the playhead, a bunch of midi data gets sent through the VEP instances and all midi tracks show activity. This appears to be related to the delays I'm seeing, but I can't prove or disprove that. But maybe all that data being sent every time I perform any action is related?

Any help would be appreciated!
 
How many midi tracks do you have and are they sending data every time you stop? For instances do you have 1000's of midi tracks with some sort of midi insert on them that is sending those settings each time you hit stop? It would take a lot of midi data being sent to cause this behaviour so it could be something else but it sounds like something is sending a huge amount of midi data every time you hit stop.
 
How does your performance meter look? If it's quite high you should try increasing ASIO guard to high (or simply turning it on if it's not already).

Sometimes plugins can cause the lagginess too, particularly those that use some form of 'look ahead'. Activate the "Constrain Delay Compensation" button to see if it deactivates plugins. This helped me recently when a project of mine was unresponsive on a less powerful machine.

If neither of those work, it'd be worth running Cubase as administrator. That has also fixed some graphical issues I was having.
 
@Sample Fuel and @Jdiggity1 thank you for your replies!

How many midi tracks do you have and are they sending data every time you stop? For instances do you have 1000's of midi tracks with some sort of midi insert on them that is sending those settings each time you hit stop? It would take a lot of midi data being sent to cause this behaviour so it could be something else but it sounds like something is sending a huge amount of midi data every time you hit stop.
It does seem this way. I have about 2900 MIDI tracks all told, which may be the issue.

When I have the VST rack open, I see activity on all instances whenever I relocate the playhead. I checked to see if I have any MIDI inserts or sends any tracks and I don't, but I do make heavy use of expression maps, and many of the first slots make send some sort of midi data whether it be a channel change or CC value.

I tried an experiment and added a blank slot as the first entry of all expression maps that sends no data, and this didn't seem to have an effect. I didn't fully set up the map with directions though, so perhaps that is related? No idea...

I also tried using MIDI OX to see if I can capture any data coming out of Cubase, but nothing showed up
 
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How does your performance meter look? If it's quite high you should try increasing ASIO guard to high (or simply turning it on if it's not already).

Sometimes plugins can cause the lagginess too, particularly those that use some form of 'look ahead'. Activate the "Constrain Delay Compensation" button to see if it deactivates plugins. This helped me recently when a project of mine was unresponsive on a less powerful machine.

If neither of those work, it'd be worth running Cubase as administrator. That has also fixed some graphical issues I was having.
Thanks for this info! I tried your suggestions and didn't have any luck with them. ASIO meter is fine, but I'll see if messing with asio guard helps.
 
Alright, reporting back...

Cubase now runs a lot smoother, but only because I have way less instances connected. Connecting all instances with the amount of ports and channels that I have makes Cubase crawl.

There are some other things I did that maybe helped? Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to be scientific about my approach, it's just trial and error. Here all the random things I tried:

- Enabled Constrain Delay Compensation
- Added blank slots at the start of expression maps (I use a ton of these)
- Increased MIDI Latency Mode to high
- Thinned out CC data
- Disabled ASIO Guard
- Removed all non VEP VSTi's and migrated them to VEP
- Reduced the amount of connected VEP instances
- Enabled multi-core processing in Kontakt
- Cleared and rebuilt AppData prefs
- Removed all VST plugins from group channels

What likely caused the performance increase was moving non-VEP VSTi's into VEP, as well as connecting less instances.

Does anyone know how using VEP midi ports effects performance in Cubase? It's got to do something because have a lot of them, probably more 1400+. When I delete all MIDI channels in Cubase, responsiveness is perfect, so there must be some correlation.
 
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Cubase use to be a lot worse about populating midi ports from VE PRO. I still feel the more you have the slower the program will react. 1400+ midi ports sounds like an ENORMOUS amount. I have a crazy huge template of about 3600+ tracks....but I use (an I am guesing) about 350-400 midi ports max. Cubase definitely reacts noticeably slower than a fresh blank sequence but it still is relatively zippy with not enough lag to bug me. I suspect 1400+ would be 3 to 4 times the lag I see now....in that case I think it would be very noticeable.
 
Cubase use to be a lot worse about populating midi ports from VE PRO. I still feel the more you have the slower the program will react. 1400+ midi ports sounds like an ENORMOUS amount. I have a crazy huge template of about 3600+ tracks....but I use (an I am guesing) about 350-400 midi ports max. Cubase definitely reacts noticeably slower than a fresh blank sequence but it still is relatively zippy with not enough lag to bug me. I suspect 1400+ would be 3 to 4 times the lag I see now....in that case I think it would be very noticeable.
Interesting, and it makes perfect sense.

I think I miscalculated. I have about 22 instances with 48 ports each, so still about 1056 potential ports. I haven't been super disciplined about using every channel in each port, and I know I'm not using every port per instance. I could probably cull a fair amount out of Cubase if I had to. Curious to see if that helps...
 
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