Ran Out of CPU (conventional fix did not help)

[Darryl Ramm]

I’ve given you things to try there already...

Try save as and import of those suspect sessions.

Remove all third party plugins and start experimenting to try to check if one of those plugins is leading to session corruption. As I pointed out before if plugins are causing corruption, just removing them won’t fix current try corrupt sessions. You need to experiment and try to corrupt new sessions.

Have you carefully checked all plugins are up to date/compatible? Oops - yes you have. If your melody is “old as heck” get rid of it (to test) or update it. It does not matter if it worked in the past or works now with another DAW.

Have you looked on plugin vendors help/support forums and elsewhere for known issues?

[mjslakeridge]

20 minutes to open a session? That's a problem. Does your Surfacebook have just the single SSD? And it's 80% full? Normally you don't want to use more than 80 to 85% of the capacity of SSDs. Not sure if that would cause the "running out of CPU" error.

[Darryl Ramm]

It will not be the SSD unless there are lots of other horrible obvious things going wrong. Free space is not an issue.... and besides these are not sessions with lots of audio. Again, all indications are consistent with a corrupt session. Including slow session opens.

—

Keep trashing prefs as well as you try the things above.

[Keidiek]

Well I've been working on this and I haven't isolated the exact cause yet, but I have found some really important clues. I MIGHT be able to rule out plugins, since the eternal startup hang still happened after a fresh reinstall and removal of all plugins (reinstall might have been overkill but I'm desperate.) However the startup hang and CPU issue could also be two separate problems.

Yet I think we're close!

When I unplugged my powered USB hub and removed all controllers, interfaces and drives, I just stuck the iLok in and nothing else. Program booted up like a dream.

So I know that at least some problems are found in the USB hub. Here's my situation:

Two midi controllers, an iLok, a G-Drive hard disk with 800GB of libraries on it, a Samsung SSD with 500GB more libraries on it, my Mackie Onyx interface.

The computer has two USB 3.0 slots and one Tyoe-C which I currently use with an HDMI adapter/hub combo for my external monitor. One item can have its own port, everything else has to either go into the 3.0 powered hub or the Type C combo hub.

I moved the G-Drive over to the Type C hub and the slow boot-up problem is fixed, but weird freezes and hangs are still a thing inside the program. Now its added crashes to the list which wasn't happening before. No sign of the CPU issue yet, but that's mostly because now I can't even get far enough to try to hit play.

It gets darkest just before dawn though, right? xD

EDIT: (I still need to do the import and corrupt-testing Darryl mentioned above, I just haven't been able to yet due to the new hanging and freezing and crashing problems.)

[Darryl Ramm]

Wow, great progress.

Do you have any CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives? Especially external ones you may have disconnected? If so you might see periodic hanging problems not quite what you are seeing, but make sure any media is removed from those drives. If you have any floppy drives (yes I know.. some folks still do) remove them from the device manager.

VI samples on external drives being issues should be excluded by removing the corresponding .aaxplugin files.

Make sure none of those external drives have actual session/audio content on them (can happen accidentally even if you think everything is in the session folder)... and if they are say ExFAT drives you may have problems, content needs to be on NTFS filesystems.

[Keidiek]

At last, the culprit is found, and it is just as Darryl suspected. When I put Kontakt 5 back in, it corrupted the session.


Diagnosis in, treatment time. Now begins the whole new journey of trying to update Kontakt with a busted Native Access app and NI's legendarily unhelpful customer service. T_T

But in the meantime I can get my work done with other libraries, and that is worth celebrating!

Thank you Darryl and everyone else for the extremely helpful ideas and advice.