Any way to isolate what is causing CPU spikes?

[mtn]

Quite often when I'm in the middle of a set, Ableton will start spiking to 60-90% CPU (after running at 10-20 most of the time) and stay there until I quit out of Ableton and restart the set. This would be a lot easier to trouble-shoot if there was some way to view the CPU usage of the individual tracks or components and remove the offending effect/VST/whatever.

Is there any way to do this? Maybe a special way to print debug information?

I'm using Windows Vista 3.0GHz 4GB RAM Ableton 8.0.5

[dinaiz]

Under windows, CPU spikes can be caused by DPC (defered procedure calls, something inside the OS itself)
You have a DPC latency checker somewhere on the web, you just google it, download it, let it run for a while and see if that's the source of the problem. If it is you have a lot of tools (under vista only, not working on XP) to debug that. Generaly, that comes from a device driver ....

that might not be the solution but at least, that's a clue to start with ! Good luck

[mtn]

Hi Dinaiz. Thanks for the input. I've run the DPC latency checker before and it didn't uncover any problems. Keep in mind this is the Ableton Live process that is taking up 60-90% CPU under certain conditions with a large number of effects & VSTs. I'm perfectly willing to admit that maybe I have some VSTs that are buggy, but right now I don't see a way to trouble-shoot that from within Ableton.

I also use a tracker called Buzz and what they do is provide a CPU utilization report for every effect/instrument in your set so you know exactly what is causing CPU utilization. Something like that would be ideal.

[dinaiz]

I whish there was such a tool too ...but ATM I have no idea about how you can do that !