Protools 12.XX performance optimization script and important tips!

[athlon64]

Originally Posted by Stevenk734

Athlon,
So very nice of you to respond after posting so many months ago.
In the meantime, that’s basically what I’ve done. I put the bat file on the desktop and install it each time I boot up PT. I do install it after I start a session.
I open a session.i haven’t had the chance to test whether it’ll keep resetting those changes, but it worked a time or two. Seems idiotic that one can’t save these changes permanently per program, butxwhat do I know.
I’m an old analog musician(68), who, after retiring from my doc gig, always wanted to try this digital stuff, so I’m no digital genius. I just went out and bought thexstandard, as you mentioned.
Quite a learning curve. I hire 25 year olds to help me(lol).
Thanks for the studio one tip. I’m pretty deep into buying a bunch of AAX PLUGS.
Will they be redownloadable from whatever come any(waves, mcdsp, isotope, etc, in studio one? Do they take vst?, AAX? Please advise for the future.
I never upgraded past version 2018. 1. Just too much can screw up with this stuff.
Anyway, thanks. I mean get post a follow up on how that script worked, just so you can know how it did. I don’t really want that blow another 330 really get bow, for 2 16s from crucial, but we’ll see.
Thank you
Sk

All of the plugins that you bought should be available in both AAX and VST versions. Those are just the engines that they use to run, you shouldn't have problems with that.

Look, long story short, it's impossible to be 100% objective because everyone uses their tools in different ways. I use my daw for everything from studio recording at small buffers, to recording live gigs since i'm also a live sound engineer, and then in the end mixing.

My primary profession is software development, so since i'm young and i'm an IT guy, i don't have that many problems with trying out new stuff, but that doesn't mean that my goal is to try out everything. I just want a transparent setup that works so smooth for my needs that i can sit down and thing about mixing and music, not the DAW and plugins. That should be the goal for everyone.

In a big picture, protools used to be the software that tries to do that by becoming an industry standard. Everyone uses the same thing so it's much easier to learn it, keep using it forever and forget about learning new stuff right?

In theory that's true, in practice, big companies like AVID. Once they win the monopoly, start rising prices and caring about customer experience less and less.

There are things in protools, done so bad from a software development side, considering the price of the software, that i wouldn't pay another coin to AVID just for the sake of protest. Everything from the optimization to things like mix\edit window being a part of one big window that can't get properly stretched across multiple different resolution screens to let you arrange the mixing and editing window the way you want (on windows machines)...
This is just ridiculous and absolutely unacceptable for a software in this price range.

And then there are smaller companies like presonus, that actually try to make people who gave them money happy, actually listen to their customers and in the end, have a piece of software that so far for my needs only turned out to be far superior to protools in terms of stability, optimization and workflow speed... that i simply can't run away from the fact that it seems to me the industry "standard" philosophy is choking the industry in the same way many other "snakeoil" psyhoacoustical tricks are choking the industry.

In my opinion, "protools is an industry standard for a good objective reason" in these days makes as much sense as "i can't get that led zeppelin sound because i don't have good enough analogue equipment to work with".

A massive bunch of crap. And this is an industry flooded with such things and philosophies.

So yes, i understand that people don't want to change daw's because they got used to something. But forcing protools because they are a standard, and because you got used to them, even considering you are having a bunch of problems, isn't exactly a way to get a transparent mixing setup that lets you focus on music.

If protools works great and smooth for you fantastic, keep using it. But if you keep having problems like i did, please abandon the industry standard philosophy and try something else.

If you want to go for studio one like i did, i recommend the last available version. You should easily get VST's that you bought for it.

[Stevenk734]

Athlon,
Thanks. Like I said, I simply got PT because that’s what I thought I should get. I’m 68, so it’s all a learning curve for me.
I’ve been around all kinds of tech company rudeness for many years. Frankly,we’re all paying to be beta testers. It’s all a racket.
It was very nice of you to post that fix,. I’ll post an outcome reply ,
after I’ve done several restarts and sessions.
Thx
Sk

[seanmccoy]

2018.7 has been generally very good for me, but recently I've experienced some CPU spiking when running at 64. I ran the batch file yesterday while working on a TV mix, and the spikes were gone. I haven't had a chance to test it while recording yet, and I still have occasional video errors, but the numbers in System Usage show clearly that CPU draw is low and steady.

[Stevenk734]

Hi Sean, Athlon,

I think I’ll post my cpu usage with a screen shot,
after I do some more work. I just run a non commercial studio for personal projects, do not do high volume/use.
From what I’ve already noticed, cpu usage was only around 30% , with some variation. I see one core spike into the 60s for short bits, so, I assume, that’s what’s upsetting the cpu.
Bought PT 2018 about 6?months ago. Bought current PC at same time.
I was learning a bit on PT 10, which I picked up cheap, but moved on to 64 bit when I bought 2018 and New PC.so, we’ll see. Didn’t have problem in the first few months, with newer setup. Did do some fairly large sessions then. Don’t really want to spend 330 more to get 2 16 EAM chips from crucial yet.

[eaglecanyon1952]

Hello Group, looks like I have run across this set of postings at the right time. I am new to PT and appreciate finding tweaks that help the overall performance. I am running a Dell XPs 8300 with an Intel I7 2600 quad core with 12 gb (soon to be 16gb) of memory, SSD OS Drive, 7200RPM SATA III audio drive.

Being new to PT I had been looking for the performance others are seeing and the loading of their CPU and in the last 5 pages I see i't in the 20 to 40% range depending on the session. Recently I've been doing some tweaks to the system and I've now got my CPU and Memory running in the 15 -25% range and with 25-30 tracks I can work with a buffer of 64 quite well... .no way I can get to 32 right now.

Going in to PT I had thought that I'd get a new PC to specifically handle PT, (Currently at 12.7.0) because I am still uning Windows 7. Obviously going to a new system I"ll go Windows 10 Pro and 32gb of ram.

The system I am leaning to is using the I7-8700 3.2ghz (turbo to 4.6) I was concerned when I was reading to Turn off Turbo... that would be a big hit to over all performance I'd think.... Is there others out here running a system with the I-8700 and do you find the processor to be stable with PT? I am thinking that with 32gb ram and a 500gb PCIE SSD as a OS - System drive I should see a remarkable difference over my current I7-2600 CPU at 3.2 ghz.

With that said I am also thinking my track count and performance should really increase making my system a much more efficient system and hopefully bringing my Latency down over what I am seeing now...

Any Suggestions is appreciated on just leaving Turbo Boost on all the time.. .

[athlon64]

Originally Posted by eaglecanyon1952

Hello Group, looks like I have run across this set of postings at the right time. I am new to PT and appreciate finding tweaks that help the overall performance. I am running a Dell XPs 8300 with an Intel I7 2600 quad core with 12 gb (soon to be 16gb) of memory, SSD OS Drive, 7200RPM SATA III audio drive.

Being new to PT I had been looking for the performance others are seeing and the loading of their CPU and in the last 5 pages I see i't in the 20 to 40% range depending on the session. Recently I've been doing some tweaks to the system and I've now got my CPU and Memory running in the 15 -25% range and with 25-30 tracks I can work with a buffer of 64 quite well... .no way I can get to 32 right now.

Going in to PT I had thought that I'd get a new PC to specifically handle PT, (Currently at 12.7.0) because I am still uning Windows 7. Obviously going to a new system I"ll go Windows 10 Pro and 32gb of ram.

The system I am leaning to is using the I7-8700 3.2ghz (turbo to 4.6) I was concerned when I was reading to Turn off Turbo... that would be a big hit to over all performance I'd think.... Is there others out here running a system with the I-8700 and do you find the processor to be stable with PT? I am thinking that with 32gb ram and a 500gb PCIE SSD as a OS - System drive I should see a remarkable difference over my current I7-2600 CPU at 3.2 ghz.

With that said I am also thinking my track count and performance should really increase making my system a much more efficient system and hopefully bringing my Latency down over what I am seeing now...

Any Suggestions is appreciated on just leaving Turbo Boost on all the time.. .

In my opinion disabling turbo or all kinds of clock changing and power saving mechanisms can help with the computers DPC latencies a bit, but bu far the most important thing is that the drivers for all components are good and that they work well together.
In the other words, when you take the machine out of the box with a fresh windows install and run latencymonitor, you should have no jumps over 1ms no matter what you do. If you have them, the best thing is to try updating all drivers, and then if that doesn't work, simply pick another machine. Because these problems aren't easily solvable.

[chrisdee]

For Windows you can put this into a batch script that starts Pro Tools with affinity and then also sets priority.


FFF leaves two cores for the OS. FFFE leaves one core for the OS.

REM minus two cores
%COMSPEC% /c start "ProTools" /affinity FFF "%PROGRAMFILES%\Avid\Pro Tools\ProTools.exe"

timeout /t 22

%WINDIR%\System32\wbem\wmic process where name="ProTools.exe" CALL setpriority "high priority"

[eaglecanyon1952]

Athlon, It sounds like everyone deals with the same issues and tries different tweaks to better their performance... as I said, I'm doing the same.

I was wondering if anyone else was using the Intel I7 8700 CPU and how they see their performance with that Chip. Unless you have 2 people with Identical systems (both hardware and software) the numbers are going to change and be different and even with the same set up you will probably see different numbers as well.

I have done all the steps in the optimization and I plan to check the benchmarks with and with out Hyper threading and or Turbo Boost to see how my system tracks.

My monitor is a 1920x1080p only monitor with HDMI, I"ve had issues with 4K monitors on my laptop and I don't see trying it in the studio at this point...so, the 8700 systems offer a Intel 630 graphics controller on board, does the onboard graphics controller work just fine for 1080p? I do not play games nor do I do any heavy graphics related programs... This machine will be a PT only system in the studio. I am trying to keep from adding a noisy graphics adapter card that also adds to heat build up... Any thoughts on that from anyone here?

As for CPU power and usage, my guess the fastest more powerful CPUs will greatly help the track counts and reducing the latency.... so my idea of going to a new faster more powerful system can't hurt!

Thanks for keeping this thread going and responding.

[ionactive]

Really good read. I follows all this and was getting some improvements, now the improvements are amazing and I cannot quite recall how I have done this?

Have latest Pro Tools build 2018.12

Have the latest October Windows 10 build (the one Pro Tools does not officially support yet.

Have a windows system - i9-7980XE with 64Gig RAM (basically a modded music PC from Scan).

With all of the above, and before I looked at this thread and others, I was getting 20% CPU usage at idle, even before opening a project. Once open, the CPU would actually drop a little with the odd spike. All cores (18 with out HT) were in use so it seemed. If I record enabled a track then CPU would jump up on core 9. It would play / record at 64 buffer, but better at 128 / 256. All well and good, but I thought better could be achieved.

So I followed various things like:

1) Turn of HT
2) Turn off overclocking
3) Turn off boost etc.

Then I applied the fix on this thread - got good results with 0,1,2,3 and 14,15,16 and 17 cores deselected. Overall CPU came down, less CPU random usage, but still some idle CPU usage.

So - I then used LatancyMon and found a couple of things that did not lok right. I appeared to have high latency on ntoskrnl.exe. Did a search and applied the following correction "BCDEDIT /SET DISABLEDYNAMICTICK YES " (from command prompt).

Looking again I noticed a few other things that lead me to:

1) Disable onboard audio (BIOS)
2) Disable onboard graphics (device manage) - I have geforce 680 card
3) Disable all wifi (BIOS)
4) Disable blue tooth

Rebooted.

THEN... when opening up Pro Tools i noted NO idle at all - nothing. Opened a session.... 0 or 1 % idle...

Record armed - NO CHANGE - low CPU.

Played session, recorded some sessions, loaded a load of Slate plugins... All with very low CPU. All of this WITHOUT deselecting any cores.... all 18 working available but not being used.

So then, in stages, I did the following. Each time I rebooted, checked LatencyMON for 1 hour, ran a performance pass mark test, and tested pro tools

1) Overclocked in stages
2) Turned HT back on
3) Turned boost back on

(all the things you are told to turn off).

It just got better and better. Currently have a super fast, super stable, very low CPU useage even on a big session....

The question I am not quite sure about, and this is annoying, I am not quite sure what fixed it?

ARHHHH!

Mark

[athlon64]

Originally Posted by ionactive

Really good read. I follows all this and was getting some improvements, now the improvements are amazing and I cannot quite recall how I have done this?

Have latest Pro Tools build 2018.12

Have the latest October Windows 10 build (the one Pro Tools does not officially support yet.

Have a windows system - i9-7980XE with 64Gig RAM (basically a modded music PC from Scan).

With all of the above, and before I looked at this thread and others, I was getting 20% CPU usage at idle, even before opening a project. Once open, the CPU would actually drop a little with the odd spike. All cores (18 with out HT) were in use so it seemed. If I record enabled a track then CPU would jump up on core 9. It would play / record at 64 buffer, but better at 128 / 256. All well and good, but I thought better could be achieved.

So I followed various things like:

1) Turn of HT
2) Turn off overclocking
3) Turn off boost etc.

Then I applied the fix on this thread - got good results with 0,1,2,3 and 14,15,16 and 17 cores deselected. Overall CPU came down, less CPU random usage, but still some idle CPU usage.

So - I then used LatancyMon and found a couple of things that did not lok right. I appeared to have high latency on ntoskrnl.exe. Did a search and applied the following correction "BCDEDIT /SET DISABLEDYNAMICTICK YES " (from command prompt).

Looking again I noticed a few other things that lead me to:

1) Disable onboard audio (BIOS)
2) Disable onboard graphics (device manage) - I have geforce 680 card
3) Disable all wifi (BIOS)
4) Disable blue tooth

Rebooted.

THEN... when opening up Pro Tools i noted NO idle at all - nothing. Opened a session.... 0 or 1 % idle...

Record armed - NO CHANGE - low CPU.

Played session, recorded some sessions, loaded a load of Slate plugins... All with very low CPU. All of this WITHOUT deselecting any cores.... all 18 working available but not being used.

So then, in stages, I did the following. Each time I rebooted, checked LatencyMON for 1 hour, ran a performance pass mark test, and tested pro tools

1) Overclocked in stages
2) Turned HT back on
3) Turned boost back on

(all the things you are told to turn off).

It just got better and better. Currently have a super fast, super stable, very low CPU useage even on a big session....

The question I am not quite sure about, and this is annoying, I am not quite sure what fixed it?

ARHHHH!

Mark

Yeah this is what i figured over time. Most of these optimization Techniques are basically a way of working around the fact that yours PC doesn't have low DPC latencies. Which can be checked with latencymon.

DPC latencies are an indication of how good your PC's realtime performance are. If you have a spike over 1ms that means that some driver is blocking your CPU from replying instantly. So some other driver (your soundcard ASIO driver for an example) is forced to wait. Which is not acceptable for DAW's and you will get a cpu usage spike. Or a cracke/error.

Having a PC with really low DPC latencies is key to good DAW performance. And it's not related with how much power you have in the PC. It's related with how good are the drivers for the components that you have.

What's weird to me is that you have a PC from a builder making PC dedicated for DAW's. And by default it has DPC latency problems. That should have been the first thing they watch out for.