I have a set here that I made the other day from a short loop of noise recorded, I duplicated it several times, dragged it to sampler and impulse, then grabbed a drum loop from a folder of samples and used it in about 3 samplers as small snippets (like kick, hat, snare)
When I just loaded it up and hit play my PC freaked out, then I stopped and it was idling at nearly 30% CPU, I pressed "stop all clips" no difference, still idling at about 20%
I had loads of other stuff open, so I went and closed it all and it made no difference, it was still idling at between 20-30%
Now here's the weird thing: I did "file>new" and it went down to about 1% idle, then I loaded the same set again and it idled at about 1-2% - as I would expect it to with all Live plug-ins that's not playing
but I hit play, bringing one clip in at a time and gradually the CPU meter crept up, then when it got to a clip that was midi playing sampler, just a little simple snare pattern using a drum loop cut off at the snare, it jumps to 60%+ and starts dropping out, then when I hit stop and stop all clips it is idling at around 20% again
All I had in this set was 1 audio track and 7 midi tracks of sampler and impulse tracks with samplers, impulse, and Live's own FX - the only external thing was waves L2 on the master, and I turned it off and it still happened - plus it's never given me trouble before
I tried turning the audio clips and all the samplers to RAM mode
this is a VERY simple set, with only 3 samples in it, but they are used repeatedly
admittedly my computer is only an athlon 2200 but usually it would have no problem with something like this and it is the idling that is odd because Lives plug-ins are supposed to be disabled when no audio passes to or from them
the track on the right "9 midi" is the one that keeps putting it over the edge
http://www.alexisforge.co.uk/NOYZZZZ.alp