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Hopefully not beating this topic to death, but a bit of frustration here.

As the graphic shows, there is uneven distribution of load from Studio One and plugins such that a single core is saturated while the other 11 are close to idling.

IIRC, load distribution is mainly OS and CPU directed. But I'm wondering if there are any tools or tricks to force certain processes off of one core an onto another.

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by Bub on Tue Jan 25, 2022 11:16 am
I recently saw a video by someone at Presonus. They said that cores don't matter because VST's only use a single core. I can't remember which video it was. One by Gregor IIRC? IOW I'm not sure all cores being equally active are a good thing or even possible but I could be wrong.

The best thing to do is use Google's Advanced search engine and do a search for 'Setting up your daw' and point it toward Sweetwater's site. They have a really good guide that covers your bios and system setup for best performance. I'd start there and do what it says then see if your performance improves.

Shane

Intel i7 6700k || 16GB RAM || 2 x 250GB SSD's || Win 10 Pro || Presonus Studio One Pro 5.5 || Studio 1810c || Yamaha HS-80M's || ART Pro VLA II Compressor || ART Pro MPA II Reference Series Mic Pre || Blue Bluebird Mic || The usual misc. guitars.
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by j0001s on Tue Jan 25, 2022 12:09 pm
Bub wroteI recently saw a video by someone at Presonus. They said that cores don't matter because VST's only use a single core. I can't remember which video it was. One by Gregor IIRC? IOW I'm not sure all cores being equally active are a good thing or even possible but I could be wrong.

This isn't quite true. VST instruments are restricted to a single core, that is one VST multichannel instrument cannot split its workload among multiple cores. But VSTs in general run in all cores in Studio One.

However, it appears that the first core does run the main Studio One process, so having the most power available for the first core is a good idea. Translate - turning hyperthreading OFF seems to be the right approach (at least for Windows 10/Intel).

I came to these conclusions after spending a day doing experiments to see how VSTs were distributed. During these experiments, I had no other applications running.

I set up a project that had multiples of 16 tracks (I think it was 64 tracks), and stuck the same audio file on every track, set it to loop, and hit play. I then added a processor heavy plugin one at a time to each track (IIRC, it was Soothe), and looked to see what cores' load increased. It was clear that they were being added to each core in succession. It was also clear that with the base processing load of Studio One in core 1, that core 1 ran out of processing first.

If I turned off hyperthreading, I could load up way more plugins total.

Now, things get complicated if you disable plugins, remove plugins, and even reload a project on the brink. I won't pretend to say I understand the allocation algorithm, except to confirm that there is one, and it tries to do a good job. I did see cases where a core near its limit would have some plugins redistributed to other cores.

VST instruments are a minor part of my projects, so I didn't bother doing tests on them.

And I'd have to go back to my notes, but IIRC, it did try to keep plugins for one channel on the same core.
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by PreAl on Tue Jan 25, 2022 12:21 pm
I wouldn't be running yourphone, gamebar,photos eyc and search indexing in a daw environment, even in a suspended state..I dual boot my laptop with another instance of windows so I can avoid running all this.

Where you place your plugin can also be important to for the core allocation, e.g. perhaps put it on it's own track or bus etc.

Could be useful if you put your full hardware in your signature, would be interested to see if it's Dell for instance. I run a Dell laptop and the only way I can get it to perform well is to tell studio one to avoid the first core when running.

I would also strongly recommend latencymon for testing.

Intel i9 9900K (Gigabyte Z390 DESIGNARE motherboard), 32GB RAM, EVGA Geforce 1070 (Nvidia drivers).
Dell Inspiron 7591 (2 in 1) 16Gb.
Studio One Pro 6.x, Windows 11 Pro 64 bit, also running it on Mac OS Catalina via dual boot (experimental).
Presonus Quantum 2626, Presonus Studio 26c, Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport Classic (1.45), Atom SQ, Atom Pad, Maschine Studio, Octapad SPD-30, Roland A300, a number of hardware synths.
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by guysmith2 on Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:47 am
The folks at IK Multimedia pointed out this previous

https://answers.presonus.com/52474/mult ... l-selected

"It seems that any tracks which have the same input selected in S1 have all of their VST processing stack on one core, but when changing the input source to "None", multi-threading takes place and S1 splits CPU usage over mutltiple [sic] cores."

I just tried this (changing input on Rhythm Guitar, lead Guitar and Bass to "none") and sure enough, three loads appear to have shifted of of the main S1 core to other cores.

ATTENTION PRESONUS ENGINEERING: This needs attending to. Just because different tracks started life using the same input channel doesn't mean they need to share CPU cores.
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by horstmoshroom on Thu Jan 27, 2022 2:24 pm
Imagine, just read the following:
I remembered a thread here at the Avid Forums where someone was adjusting the CPU affinity to reduce the number of cores used by Pro Tools. To test, I adjusted the CPU affinity so that Pro Tools only used 6 of the 8 cores in my i7 3770K. Ta Da. No more pops, the CPU spikes decreased in magnitude, and I was able to run 128 buffer at 24/96 with VIs for recording

It is an interesting thing,
on the occasion of this topic I have read a lot,
and found some reasons to test that...

Finally, my laptop for the guitar runs the audio interface with 192khz and 64 samples.
(The processor is a 2Core/4Thread and my AmpSim is now running on core 0 and 2 ,
so only on 2 (main) cores, which are each used to 30%).

To permanently save or refine my settings, I use System Explorer.
(If System Explorer is not started, the Windows default settings are used).
https://systemexplorer.net/ (freeware)

Regards,
Tino

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