Live sets take a lot of time to load

[Alfonx]

Not all NVME are equal, plus also depends on motherboard and how it addresses the NVME slots, some share same data paths asother devicess, so having other devices on same path means sharing bandwith which in turn means slowr throughput of the drives. My gen4 NVME is on the slot that my CPU addresses directly on its own, and I get full gen4 speed.

I have a Gigabyte z370 hd3p and Samsung evo 850 sata 3 (system) and Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB, M.2
(D: / Data / Samples / Ableton packs / vsts / Native Instruments data)
The Performance monitor shows there is nothing special going on while Ableton is loading the set….
But ableton live is in state “not responding for a while” (i think this is because live is hardly loading the set).

I would expect the mainboard can directly access the NVMe.
I have an external usb ssd (sandisk extreme portable).
I could plug this off and test again…
But - like i mentioned- the task manager showed “no problems/no 100% peaks or something).

[Mark Williams]

I have a Gigabyte z370 hd3p and Samsung evo 850 sata 3 (system) and Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB, M.2

What you expect and what actually happens are not the same. Like I said previously, not all NVME/SSD are the same, and not all motherboard/CPU address them the same, if a graphics card and NVME/SSD are sharing the same bandwith, then the CPU cannot get the data thoughput fast enough, hitting performance, Mu motherboard see's the Gen4 NVME on its own port, and can take data straight from that at 100%, now if I put that same Gen4 NVME on the other NVME port. that shares same data path as my SSDs' then it suffers a performance hit.

[jestermgee]

There are many factors that can affect a set loading time from obvious things such as samples and content that have to be loaded into memory, to plugins that have to be loaded and initialized, some of which then decide to "phone home" and check for updates or send "anonymous data" to the developer and some of these will not be affected by how over powered your system is, there are still some laws of physics a high end gaming rig cannot overcome. Not everything will need full CPU or Drive access all the time, some things just have delays associated and loading a set can range from seconds to minutes irrespective of what hardware it is loaded on and problem these days is people look at specs and cost of their rig and just assume it will defy physics but fail to actually understand how computers and software actually work in a basic sense.

To make the point again, for any seriousness to be taken, you need to do some actual controlled tests and use defining numbers because statements like "long time", "takes ages" mean different things to different people.... Waiting on a bus can be a "long time" but also a trip to Mars can be defined as a "long time".

30 seconds to load a set is perfectly acceptable and honestly, cannot understand the complaint other than expectations are outside the realm of realism.

[Alfonx]

I have a Gigabyte z370 hd3p and Samsung evo 850 sata 3 (system) and Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB, M.2

What you expect and what actually happens are not the same. Like I said previously, not all NVME/SSD are the same, and not all motherboard/CPU address them the same, if a graphics card and NVME/SSD are sharing the same bandwith, then the CPU cannot get the data thoughput fast enough, hitting performance, Mu motherboard see's the Gen4 NVME on its own port, and can take data straight from that at 100%, now if I put that same Gen4 NVME on the other NVME port. that shares same data path as my SSDs' then it suffers a performance hit.

Yes. The nvme is official supported by my mobo, by using the onboard slot/connector M2A_32G it will disable 1 (of 6) SATA port but because of this (disabling 1 sata port) it gives full bandwith to the nvme ssd.

[Alfonx]

There are many factors that can affect a set loading time from obvious things such as samples and content that have to be loaded into memory, to plugins that have to be loaded and initialized, some of which then decide to "phone home" and check for updates or send "anonymous data" to the developer and some of these will not be affected by how over powered your system is, there are still some laws of physics a high end gaming rig cannot overcome. Not everything will need full CPU or Drive access all the time, some things just have delays associated and loading a set can range from seconds to minutes irrespective of what hardware it is loaded on and problem these days is people look at specs and cost of their rig and just assume it will defy physics but fail to actually understand how computers and software actually work in a basic sense.

To make the point again, for any seriousness to be taken, you need to do some actual controlled tests and use defining numbers because statements like "long time", "takes ages" mean different things to different people.... Waiting on a bus can be a "long time" but also a trip to Mars can be defined as a "long time".

30 seconds to load a set is perfectly acceptable and honestly, cannot understand the complaint other than expectations are outside the realm of realism.

Yes - i expected to load faster not just because of "i have spend some money so it have to be quicker now".
The story ist: When I still had my normal hard drive, I observed that my hard drive was 100% utilised (NI contact) while my live sets were loaded....
This leads me to buying a ssd (nvme). Now the ssd is doing nothing (2%) - yes, loading is faster. But i wonder whats going on because the task manager shows a bit of "load" but not much. So I was puzzling over what exactly happens while it says "loading the live set"....
Where or what is the bottleneck.

If Ableton live had a debug mode and wrote in the log what exactly is done while the live set is loaded, then you could find out what exactly costs a lot of time (e.g. waiting for VST XYZ to phone home). I did some googling - unfortunately I didn't find such a debug parameter. What a pity.

[Alfonx]

16.07.2021: To cut a long story short: I contacted Ableton. Perhaps there is a way for logging the loading process. So i can see which process takes so long.

----------------------
I changed the paths of “temporary files” and “cache” from sata ssd to my nvme ssd.

This obviously speeded up loading a project 20sec. faster (loading time was 60 sec.- now its 37 sec.). The project contains an mp3 which will be converted to wave when open up the live set. But my other project is still at 30 sec. Loading time while taskmanager shows “nothing is going on”.

Another idea:
My user library is on external ssd (usb 3.1).
My packs are on nvme ssd. Perhaps moving the user library from external ssd to internal nvme ssd the will speed up something.

If i would know what live is exactly doing for which time while loading the set i would be a bit wiser…..

[Alfonx]

I asked the Ableton Support and i got a good solution so i want to share it with you

"There isn't a way to set a parameter that logs the loading of a live set using the Options.txt file.

However, if you use the "Generate a Status Report" feature in Live, once you unzip the Report, you will find in the Preferences folder which contains a Log.txt file. In the Log.txt, you will find the processes line by line for each recent run of Live along with a timestamps. This could be a potentially helpful resource for you should you want more transparency into Live's initialization process and which areas are taking more time. "