High CPU Usage Live 9 Even After Freezing/Flattening Tracks

[Acid303]

I had a project that was getting towards 60%+ of about 20 tracks so decided to freeze and flatten them. To my surprise this only reduced my cpu usage to 40% which I think is a lot considering it's just playing back audio. The only channel that hasn't been frozen/flattened is the kick channel and that is just drum rack samples and a few flattened tracks have some size-chain compressors on them. Is this normal?

Would an SSD or extra RAM help (I currently have 4GB). I know my laptop is pretty old (late 2008 macbook pro) but I'm pretty sure when I've had quite a few audio tracks in the past they've barely touched 5-10%.

Any thoughts?

Also getting quite a lot of spinning beach ball problems with Live 9 although some users with 12 core macs and the latest and greatest macbook pros are also experiencing this so pretty sure thats their dodgy programming.

Starting to get irritated with Live 9 actually and Ableton's serious bugs. I wondered what all the complaints in Live 8 were about as I didn't really experience any/many issues. Feel like selling up and jumping to bitwig when it arrives but I do like Live a lot and feel at home in it so I dunno.

[RaidenOffKey]

This seems to be a common issue with many threads popping up.
I'm experiencing horrendous CPU issues with Live 9 on a very powerful PC which means I can't finish tracks using Ableton alone, even very small projects brings Ableton to its knees.
I'm now using Studio One to finish tracks which I must say is a great programme. If it wasn't for Push I'd consider using Studio One exclusively or maybe reverting back to L8 (aside from its relentless crashing, it didn't have these CPU issues).