Hello,
I have a small project in Sonar Artist (10 tracks and around 30 plugins), which have an extremely low performance. When I play the project there is a lot of pops and the interface responsiveness is really slow. There is nothing special in the project and the CPU meter never goes over 80% (as far as I can tell by the small indicators) in any of the 4 CPU displayed. I have a laptop with 16GB RAM, Intel Core i5, SSD 500GB.
 
I think the most heaviest plugins I am using could be 3 Waves VEQ, but this cannot explain the poor performance I have. Mi sound interface is a M-Audio Projectmix I/O with a buffer of 1024 samples (this is what I used while mixing) so it is high enough to not produce a high CPU usage.
 
This same thing happens to me in other Sonar projects... even I think that in the past I asked for help in this forum about other performance issues I had.
 
I also use Reaper and I have several projects a lot bigger that this (50 or more tracks with more that 100 plugins) and no issue at all under the same audio interface settings and computer. Well, this performance issue was what made me start my search of a DAW with less issues and I found Reaper. Sadly the project I am working on is an old one I started to work on Sonar a lot of time ago and now I have to finish it, but is probing to be a real challenge with all the performance issues.
 
I don't know if there is any advice on this. Could it be a problem with the version of Sonar I am using (Artist)? I have it updated to the last version. Any suggestion? I really don't want to invest a lot of time troubleshooting this issue as I did in the past with no real success (just a little improvement)... perhaps it will be quicker to just migrate the project to Reaper (with all the hassle that involves).

Does your interface support ASIO drivers (and are you using them)?  Also, is this computer Wifi enabled - try turning wifi off while mixing.

dwardzala
Does your interface support ASIO drivers (and are you using them)?  Also, is this computer Wifi enabled - try turning wifi off while mixing.

Thanks for your response swardzala. Yes I am using ASIO in my interface and no WiFi.

I'm guessing this is due to one troublesome plugin. It may not be that the plugin is especially CPU-hungry, but that there's some interoperability issue with SONAR. Do things improve if you bypass all FX Plugins (hotkey 'E' or FX button in the Mix Module of the Control Bar)? If so, start disabling/removing plugins until you find the culprit. If not, you might need to start looking at synth plugins, if any.

Thanks brundlefly for your suggestion. I will try bypassing all plugins and checking which one is the culprit. And I have no synths in the project, only audio tracks.
 
Anyway I would be very surprised to find one plugin as the one causing this issue. I only used Waves and Izotope (Alloy, Nectar) plugins, none of which should have compatibility issues with Sonar.
 
I will get back tomorrow with my findings. I am at the work now which sadly is not a mix studio work, just a software/hardware support job 

When mixing you may need to bump up audio buffers. Lower buffers consume more CPU, and any plugins with look ahead to them can cause noticeable degradation in performance.

If you happen to be mixing and want to track more, hitting E to globally bypass plugins is convenient to allow you to lower audio buffers and switch back to mixing again afterwards.

A quick check for you is to hit E and see if performance changes noticeably.

Well, increasing audio buffers is what I did as I mentioned in the OP. I use to increase from 64 samples when tracking to 1024 samples when mixing which always has been more than enough for my projects at least in Reaper. Anyway I tried up to 2048 samples with no changes in the project behavior.

have you tried disabling plug ins as brundle mentioned to see if that helped ?
(hotkey 'E' or FX button in the Mix Module of the Control Bar)
 
it might just be a certain FX chewing through CPU's.
 

Hi all, I tried your recommendation of bypassing all the FXs and with that I could spot the issue. It was produced by Izotope RX-Noise I was using in two tracks. I am a little surprised to see the impact of that plugin in this project considering that it is a plugin that I use a lot (and with many more instances than here) with no issues at all in the other DAW.
 
Also I used that plugin when I was starting my mixing, but the issue appeared very later and it wasn't after a plugin insertion, but just after several volume/pan adjustments after the plugins for the whole project were set. So it was a little more difficult to spot the culprit. Something I don't quite understand is why the CPU meter didn't showed the high CPU usage during the playback...
 
Something I can do in Reaper and that it could helped here in order to not having to have Izotope RX-Noise using CPU is that I can apply an specific plugin to the track, something like a 'selective' freeze. I don't know if Sonar can apply only one of the plugins in my chain to the media in the track keeping the other plugins active in the FXs bin. If that could be done then I think I could apply only those noise reduction plugins to the tracks. This can be easily done in Reaper but I cannot find the way to do it in Sonar, any suggestion?
 
Btw, thank you very much for all your help. Also I received a PM from Keith Albright, Director of Development from Cakewalk providing me assistance for my issue. I am gladly impressed with the support I am receiving from Cakewalk about my issue, and even more considering that I am an user of the most 'basic' (or cheaper) version of Sonar. Thank you guys!

I am not familiar with RX, but do noise reduction via Audition all the time. Mind you I do not do this as a plugin, but rather a very intentional destructive process... Once and done, and baked into the wav file that will get mixed.

Be very mindful about plugins that could/should be baked in. You are processing every sample each and every play unnecessarily.