My live set has 15 audio tracks full of clips with rendered stems (44.1Khz 32Bit - same as set) plus 1 DrumRack track with 14 different one shots from Samplers.
In addition I have EQ8s on each track, I use several buses to route and process the audio and I also use 6 sends with normal FX on them.
CPU at idle is about 20%, running normaly at 35% and maxes out at 50% (This is on a 2012 MBP i7 Quadcore with 500GB SSD and 16 GB of RAM (both after market) running on Mavericks, Live 9.2 64Bit)
This is all good, but now to the problem:
Pretty inconsistently, but often (way too often for a live set), the CPU all the sudden spikes up to insane values (22.000% and such) the audio doesn't really crackle but basically slows to a crawl.
That problem only goes away again when I restart Live.
Interestingly OSXs ActivityMonitor does not reflect these high CPU loads it shows around 200% use (which on a 4 core with hypethreading is not that high since each core can have 100%).
Also all the other values in ActivityMonitor show nothing out of the ordinary.
One thing I noticed is that in Live the D symbol from harddisk overuse lights up some of the time when that happens, but not always.
OSXs DiskUtility showns no signs of a defective harddisk. And considering that it is an SSD, it should not have problems supplying the data of some 16-30 32Bit samples in a timely fashion.
One odd thing I noticed seems to be that this problem only happens when I use follow actions to automatically trigger the next clip, while if I manually trigger them it doesn't. Very curious!
So I'm at the end of my ideas. I would currently almost be happy if it turns out to be a faulty SSD, since they can be replaced. But as it is now I can hardly play this set to practice it. Playing with that live? Forget it!
Does anyone have an idea what could be at fault here, or maybe has had some similar problems in the past? Or at least some further ideas how to narrow down the cause?
).
