Hi everybody.


I discovered something, but people should give me feedback whether i am right or not, so we all can profit from this discovery.
Maybe some people know it, but i have never read something this before on internet.
I am on i7-4790K @4Ghz, 16GB Ram, Asrock z87 Extreme4 onboard Realtek soundcard, GTX 970, on Win 10 Pro 64bit.

Either on Live 9.6.2 32 bit or 64 bit when i have a lot of plugins in a project i got sometimes more then 100% CPU spikes and crackled sound, ´no matter what buffer i set. I discovered incidentally that if i go to the taskmanager and set the cpu affinity to only one cpu the cpu hog is gone and it falls from 80-90% to 16-23%. Can someone confirm this please? (Multi-cpu support in Ableton Live is activated). If this is the case then Ableton has to rewrite the processing code of the program.


Good luck

 

Really? Ill test now and report back with my findings. Win7 here. Couple of instances of serum with a lot of voices in both oscillators will be my first baseline. Pun intended LOL. Then Ill try a crapload of plugins in the next test.

 

How to do that on win7?

 

Sht ctrl esc to bring up task manager. Goto processes tab, right click on the process and set affinity....

 

That's depressing. :-(

 

Nice find! Although I'm running an AMD processor, I'm pretty sure I have the same motherboard or the same motherboard for the AMD line of processors. Even though I've finally gotten around to learning the ins and outs of live and have become fairly proficient with it I've always dealt with that same issue in regards to running Live, even though I know my specs should be perfectly capable of not grinding to a halt like that. It's infuriating! Either way what Windows version are you running? Is it possible to to ask for a sort of quick step by step of how you set that up so I can recreate those settings for myself. I've never heard of some of the lingo you used especially the affinity stuff and it would be most excellent to be able to use Live properly optimized. Cheers =)

 

@subGENRE I didn't see your post. Thanks!

@alphaone, I'm running 8.1 and I'll check back in with you hopefully soon as to whether it gets rid of some of the issues i've been perpetually plagued with when using Live . . . Thanks a Million! <3

 

Thanks i will test it

 

I wonder if the same thing works for other DAW's cause guys like FL studio and S1 show 100% CPU while in task manger its only 50-60%

 

I seem to have this issue as well but am on a Mac and it looks like changing the CPU affinity is difficult on this end.. I've always wondered about this with some of my sessions with 300+ tracks and/or heavy processing. Thanks for your post it makes me feel less like it's a specific issue on my end.

 

Turn off SpeedStep Technology in BIOS. Enjoy. Send me a beer.

 

Anyone Used This Method , Under Win 8.1 ?
It Would Be Great If Someone Confirm It With A Screen Capture , That Shows Step By Step.
Cause Some Of Us , Didn't Know Much About This Kind Of Process .
Thanks Brothers

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 29, 2016

I'm also struggling with this, however i'm on mac using Ableton 9.5

Anybody know a remedy for this??

 

Okay hold up, something is seriously wrong if you're using that much processing and my money is on a buggy plugin, not your CPU or Ableton. I have a 3.40 GHz Xeon E3-1231 v3 and use a shitton of plugins (in some scenarios there are at least 2 instances of BFD3, Superior Drummer, SoundToys plugins left and right, Waves' CPU-hoggers like Kramer Tape/Reel ADT, etc etc etc....) and I'm always able to monitor an additional track through something like an Arturia synth/Kontkat Library/guitar or bass through Amplitube without any latency. My projects probably average about 30-50 tracks with at least 3 plugins per track, sometimes as high as 10.

I think my CPU usage might go as high as 70% and it's pretty difficult to push it further without trying to intentionally abuse it. If I'm not mistaken, your CPU is significantly more powerful and should theoretically be able to handle far more than mine. I'd suggest loading up a project that bogs down your system and just slowly bypassing a plugin (every instance it appears throughout the project) until your system normalizes. There's something to blame here, but it isn't Ableton or your CPU if I had to guess.

 

Hi @THENATAN
Look: i found THIS how to set CPU affinity on Windows.

 

@Tygrysi: Wow, thanx for the hint. Now my CPU load fell to 10-12%. But this should not the way programs should work. Eithert the 'Speedstep Technology' is not working as expected or companies are not able to implement this function it into their programs. The System should be able to activate CPUs if needed to save electricity and heatconsumption. Now my pc is running at 4GHz all the time also when idle or doing just surfing on internet. But thanks for the tip anyway. ;)

 

Also make sure none of your audio clips have the RAM tab turned on...


- delete the content of this folder:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Ableton\Cache\Cache\Web\

Restart live

make sure if you have your live temp reco folder on the same drive as your are working your project

and if you had to turn the only one core of your CPU instead of 2 it's usually because of a bad plug that has a bad scripttting ...avoid that plug

 

@muse2love: I dont use much audioclips. I know that the plugins consume cpu, since i have 16GB of ram i dont think that its much a deal.

As i said if you turn off all cpucores but one the cpuload decreases about 3/4 and as @Tygrysi said above, when u turn off Speed Step Technology in BIOS the CPUload decreases even much more.

 

what about the mac version? is there a fix there?

 

I use a program called "Process Lasso" which is free and monitors my 8-core AMD.

When I toggled your hotfix, it happened to crash my Ableton with lots of plugins loaded (stable previous). Not sure if Process Lasso is covering the problem that your hotfix also might be solving.. just reporting my findings.