Question

Hello, I'm testing the SO3 demo, and I'm pretty excited, but there's one issue that worries me:

The RAM usage. I open the DAW, and I select "new song", nothing more, no loading any sound or recording or plugin.

And appears 30% of RAM usage. This is normal? I tried a demo of another DAW in the same computer, and the usage was much lower, this other DAW did not load all the plugins when starting. I guess that 30% RAM usage could be due to the fact that I have lots of pluguins and VST, and loading everything when SO3 starts is already taking up a lot of RAM.

 I would appreciate any comments on this. I work on W8 to 32 bits.

Answer 1

If you are running a 32-bit operating system, and you are looking at the Studio One Performance Monitor, than that sounds about right.  Here are a few key points that I want to bring to your attention:

1.  32-bit programs can only use a maximum of about 3.5 GB of RAM.  

2.  In comparing DAWs, some DAWs don't cache the same amount of resources to RAM.  You might see higher RAM usage in Studio One because a resource has been cache'd whereas another application may not use the same resources until called upon.  Both might be using the same amount of RAM, but one DAW may be caching something that another is not.

3.  The RAM usage as reported in the Performance Monitor inside of Studio One is the memory usage of the Studio One process exclusively.  This is because the program has to take into account the overhead needed to run the operating system.  For example, if you only can use 3.5 GB of RAM with your system, and the operating system is using 1.5 GB of RAM, then the Studio One process is only left with 2 GB of RAM.  Out of those 2 GB of RAM, if the program uses 3 or 400 MB of RAM upon starting the application, you are at about 20% usage.  Given that the application has to provide a little bit of head room for other applications as well as Windows, 30% would be fairly accurate.

4.  You can always go into Studio One>Options>Advanced>Services and disable any services that you are not using.

With the above information, you can truly see the benefit to using a 64-bit OS as well as a 64-bit DAW.  You can then install as much RAM as your system will allow and not have to worry about memory any longer.