Insane CPU (since upgrade 9.6)

[Shift Gorden]

You know, I was messing around in Live yesterday and noticed by Mac sounding like it was about to take off. I opened Activity Monitor and saw Live was using 160% of my CPU which was odd.

And, I was getting some pops and crackles with my Output Exhale synth. I figured it was my latency settings....

Now I'm paranoid and will be keeping an eye on this.

[Stromkraft]

I reported an odd issue involving seconds long audio dropouts yesterday, that seemed to indicate load spikes at certain parts, that minutes later played back properly.
In my set of today, nothing like that.

Updated

David at Ableton support suggested I'd investigate my plug-ins and third party controller scripts, like PXT. I did turn PXT off and that didn't make a difference of course, but I suppose it's worth trying to see if any of my plug-ins suddenly have issues with Live 9.6.

I did identify Waves Aphex Exciter as surprisingly CPU hungry in this very set, but that was before the problems mentioned above and I had flattened the whole track with this on. This set do have quite a complicated MIDI set-up with arpeggiators and Group Humanizer, but there had been no issues like these previously.

What I suspect is happening is some kind of spike behaviour, but of a different kind than what I may have encountered before.

[zerocrossing]

I've totally noticed issues since the update. Patches in Omnisphere 2 that used to work fine now bring Live 9.6 to it's knees. Has something happened to the way 3rd party plug ins are buffered? One thing I noticed is that I used to just keep my wireless on with no issues, and now I can't without getting a lot of clicks and pops even when the CPU use looks fine.

[Tarekith]

Do you have Link enabled by any chance?

[zerocrossing]

Do you have Link enabled by any chance?

Possibly... It's not something I'd use so I didn't make an effort to turn it on, but if it defaults to "on" after installation than most likely I have not turned it off. I'll check later. Thanks.

[EmotiveMusic]

I just made the mistake of replacing my 9.5 install with 9.6 while I was mid-project with deadlines. I had 130ish virtual instruments running just below 25% this morning in 9.5. It continuously spiked between 130% and 600% with 9.6. The glitch continued even if I froze and flattened almost everything down to just audio and level automation. Link was not enabled. I reinstalled 9.5 again and it seems to be back to normal.

I must say that this re-installation process worked flawlessly. It's little things like this that keep me from switching over to the composer-preferred Cubase. Now if we can only get a few more composer friendly features!

[Stromkraft]

I just made the mistake of replacing my 9.5 install with 9.6 while I was mid-project with deadlines. I had 130ish virtual instruments running just below 25% this morning in 9.5. It continuously spiked between 130% and 600% with 9.6. The glitch continued even if I froze and flattened almost everything down to just audio and level automation.

As I mentioned above I went trough something similar just one day in one specific project some weeks ago, after no issues for the first weeks of 9.6. Support came back with some suggestions for settings and changes to try for this and another graphic glitch, that all seemed unrelated to both those issues, but I followed most of them. I haven't re-experienced this specific issue since, even after I returned to most of the previous settings.

I have an inkling that it is specific plug-ins or combinations of these and specific settings that trigger this kind of issue. I have no open leads however. I also suspected background processes for a while, but I seem to have full control there and nothing was running at the time that seemed like a candidate.

One old lead is CPU spikes. In 9.6.1b1 there's this fix

"Improved CPU spikes caused by external MIDI input on OSX."

I'm on 9.6.1b5 daily and it feels quite workable indeed.

[EmotiveMusic]

Just noticed it still happens with 9.5. All unflattened tracks were Kontakt. Must have had a bad apple or something. I just backed it up, saved out stem project files and I'm under 100 tracks now at 7%. Hope the client doesn't want specific changes.

[daddytang]

9.6 was working fine for me then yesterday out of nowhere audio drop outs and pops. uninstalled reinstalled. installed the beta. for some reason with no audio playing i can see CPU spikes that go to 1000 percent. all of my other software works fine. Only Ableton is having a problem. any help would be great.

[Stromkraft]

Just noticed it still happens with 9.5. All unflattened tracks were Kontakt. Must have had a bad apple or something. I just backed it up, saved out stem project files and I'm under 100 tracks now at 7%. Hope the client doesn't want specific changes.

Have you tried turning on or off multicore in Kontakt?

[Analog27]

Im having the same issues. I was on 9.5 but since upgrading to 9.6 system usage seems to be much higher. Hoping the 9.6.1 release tightens things up

heres my system specs

Windows 10 64bit
i7 4.0 4790
32 gb of RAM

[EmotiveMusic]

Just noticed it still happens with 9.5. All unflattened tracks were Kontakt. Must have had a bad apple or something. I just backed it up, saved out stem project files and I'm under 100 tracks now at 7%. Hope the client doesn't want specific changes.

Have you tried turning on or off multicore in Kontakt?

I didn't think of this. I have 4 cores set in Kontakt and Multicore set in Live. I'm onto new projects here, but I'll keep this in mind if/when it comes back. Thanks!

[alpermo]

i upgraded 3-4 days ago. yesterday it was all working fine. tonight, first all the audio and midi instruments in the browser disappeared and reappeared. and then this cpu overload happened. i'm on a macbook by the way.

edit: i 've checked activity monitor. it's the "ableton index" causing this insane cpu hike. anybody any thoughts on this?

[tintala]

I posted this issue with 9.4 and never even got a response! I have high cpu since upgrading to 9.4 and cannot use Maschine anymore due to the cpu . it drags everything down. so yeah on 9.4, but I never got to the bottom of it here in this place. I guess I need a new computer. I am runnin w-7, 16 gb. 3.4 ghz. i5 core.. good luck.

[H20nly]

I posted this issue with 9.4 and never even got a response! I have high cpu since upgrading to 9.4 and cannot use Maschine anymore due to the cpu . it drags everything down. so yeah on 9.4, but I never got to the bottom of it here in this place. I guess I need a new computer. I am runnin w-7, 16 gb. 3.4 ghz. i5 core.. good luck.

You do not need a new computer