Help! Core I7 uneven CPU Loads / AUD.INI

why does everybody seem to think the cores should be balanced for "best performance"? There are so many of these threads.

what you're seeing is totally normal - unless cores are reaching 80% nothing is wrong. It is impossible to achieve 100% even core distribution.

What about on my one song where the drums are very slow in the intro then as soon as the double bass kicks in, my first core is near 70-80% and causing dropouts and the other cores are around 5-10%?

Is that an even balance?

Not to mention I only have 6 or so audio tracks and 4 instances of Guitar Rig and I cant seem add any new audio tracks without the whole project giving me massive monitoring latency when trying to record a guitar track.

doesn't sound like core problems to me.

So far as I know, no problem on this board has been positively traced to core balancing issues - especially clicks, dropouts and latency.

A thread can run on one and only one core. Multi-threaded apps can distribute their loads across multiple cores. Windows can distribute apps across multiple cores.

However, if a single thread is too busy and maxing out, no amount of tinkering will help.

Multiple instances of a plugin might load on the same CPU - 4 instances of Guitar Rig would likely do that. Access to shared memory would be faster if all on one core.

In short, the people who designed the i7 core structure probably know more about cores and load balancing. It is not likely that someone here will improve on that. 

Improved Multi-Core load balancing

SONAR has supported scalable load balancing for multi-core computers since SONAR 3. In 8.3 we spent some time researching different techniques to improve our task scheduler (the internal component that distributes the project workload across multiple threads). The new scheduler mechanism allows for a more even load across all cores on a multi-core system. Not only that but the new mechanism consumes less CPU and is more power efficient. We haven't measured this yet but it should actually consume less battery resources on a notebook than SONAR 8.0.2! SONAR goes environment friendly :-)

Since all systems are not made equal we decided to make this new scheduling mode configurable 
From the help file, the new aud.ini option to control this is:

ThreadSchedulingModel=<0 - 2>
Type Integer
Default 1

This variable goes in the [Wave] section and controls the interaction of the main audio thread and worker threads on multiprocessor systems when the Use Multiprocessing Engine option is enabled. Depending on the system, a particular model may result in less glitching and better overall performance. The values are as follows:
0 = Same as previous versions of SONAR.
1 = (default) Better thread balance. Model is more efficient and can provide cycles for other tasks.
2 = Additional worker thread is created. This may result in improvement with Quad processor systems or higher. Not recommended for Dual processor systems.


The above is from the Sonar 8.3 log by Noel.

Setting the "thread scheduling model" to the "2" value really seemed to help my core i7 laptop.  It was GR 4 that was hogging everything and causing dropouts even if it got to 50%.  Since I changed that to "2" it has a much more even load although the 1st core works the hardest which is normal.  I didn't bother with the core parking crap I hear it causes problems if you mess with it.
 
FWIW I don't think GR4 is multicore optimised perhaps by design for streaming purposes.