Question

My studio one v3.2.1 is spiking the performance meter between 60-80% while windows is showing only 30-40% of cpu usage and 14% ram usage.

This is what I have done when I put my computer together. I optimized windows 7 for audio, un-parked all my cpu cores and disabled unnecessary programs to startup . My system contains an i7 920 processor, 24 gb of ram, ssd drive as system disk, ssd drive for ongoing songs and audio files and a hdd for plugins. So I have everything spread out on different drives to gain as much disk speed as possible. I'm using 2 firestudio projects and 1 firestudio daisy chained and set to 48/2048 while mixing.

Things that I find wierd is that when I open my task manager it seems as core 1 is stable at around 65% usage, core 2-5 at around 25%, core 6 is jumping between 40-90% abd core7-8 again at 25%.

I have really no idea whats going an as the overall cpu usage is around 30-40 in windows but 60-80% in studio one.

Please help me find the problem here.

Answer 1

A good program never consumes 100% of your CPU as the system has other tasks. For the CPU time we take, the meter we use is proportional to the actual total system usage. All DAWs work this way, not just Studio One. If Studio One was consuming 80% of his actual CPU, the computer would probably grind to a halt. Bottom line, the application 100% max will always be somewhat lower than total system CPU to ensure that it does not destabilize the entire system.

It's kind of like the 80% rule on your electrical panel. You never use more than 80% of the total system load, to allow for over current protection. (Google it for more references).

Answer 2

I totally agree with this observation. I'm running Win8.1 - plenty of RAM and CPU power. The strange part is that there is absolutely no correlation between the WPM and Studio One CPU monitor.

Answer 3

It makes no sense to have a program that maxes out in it's own resource monitoring but my systems resource management shows that CPU usage is 21%. Simply put, there is something that needs to be updated to allow greater utilization of system resources. This has everything to do with the coding of the program.

Answer 4

I had the same problems with cpu spikes and what not going on. I notice too that the daw performance meter does not match the windows task manger monitor. However i tryed the new Studio One 5 version and did a little test and compared it to Reaper which we all know runs fairly efficient on cpu load, or so i thought....lol.  I did this on my laptop i7 2.4ghz 12ram....ya ya all that ****....anyway i have a little mobile UAC Zoom 2channel interface which i love its sound. Haven't tryed the new Presonus rigs but the older ones where very bright sounding. Zooms have that warm feel to them, i've compared them side by side.... Anyway getting off topic here. I loaded 1 track of MODO drums vst by IK Multimedia on Studio One. I installed one midi bar of a groove and hit loop and let it go. 27%cpu load on the daw and 9% on the windows task manager. Wow does that mean i can only put two more duplicate tracks and i would be *** near at 90%cpu on the daw...Nope, I then duplicated 9 more tracks of the same vst instrument. Modo drums is heavy on cpu so this will give it a good run. i also put my buffer to the max which was over 4000 just to make sure it would play. Well it played all ten tracks no problem....Studio Ones cpu load was 85% and the windows system was at 81%. Conclusion the more you load Studio One the more the meters become equal and it really is using cpu multicores. So don't worry about that stupid meter on the daw so much,just go to work. As far as Reaper, it pretty much ran the tracks the same way, but their performance meter is out to lunch to actual.. it reads low for the most part. So really your system will probably crash before the Daw ever will.  The meter was reading 65%cpu load with the ten tracks and windows task was reading 81 to 82% just like the other test. So really Studio one is a much closer representation of actual, once you start really loading it.............And by the way Studio One 5 seems to be really stabble too. I will be buying it for sure now from my 4.6 version.