I, too, have this problem. The worst culprits seem to be the Slate Digital virtual emulation plugins and some DMG Audio ones.
 
I have tried all the tricks in the book (including those mentioned in this thread) but no solution yet.

Jyri T.
I, too, have this problem. The worst culprits seem to be the Slate Digital virtual emulation plugins and some DMG Audio ones.
 
I have tried all the tricks in the book (including those mentioned in this thread) but no solution yet.

Are you talking about the The Slate Virtual Console Collection? I tested that today on 12 tracks plus on the bus, It worked fine BUT I have the 64 bit upgrade. The upgrade was free but I had to ask Slate for it. I don't know if it's still a free upgrade.

Hi Jim, I would like to know the name of the ini file if you think of it. :)
 
thanks!

Passive Drift,
 
Sorry, after checking the parm is in the CONFIGURATION file, and it is labeled "MixThreadCount".  Default is ZERO which uses all available threads.  S0, if you have a QUAD CORE multi thread CPU, you have 8 cores,  trying setting this to 7 or 6.  You will see the PERFORMANCE window only having the number of CORES based upon this number setting.
 
What this did for me was give the OS more juice to do its thing... with it set to ZERO, the OS and SONAR were fighting for the same CORE resources.  This cleared up the glitches and other issues I was having with my DAW.
 
I am not sure what this PARM is for but this was a great work around for my DAW a few years ago.
 
Jim
 

jimkleban
Passive Drift,
 
Sorry, after checking the parm is in the CONFIGURATION file, and it is labeled "MixThreadCount".  Default is ZERO which uses all available threads.  S0, if you have a QUAD CORE multi thread CPU, you have 8 cores,  trying setting this to 7 or 6.  You will see the PERFORMANCE window only having the number of CORES based upon this number setting.
 
What this did for me was give the OS more juice to do its thing... with it set to ZERO, the OS and SONAR were fighting for the same CORE resources.  This cleared up the glitches and other issues I was having with my DAW.
 
I am not sure what this PARM is for but this was a great work around for my DAW a few years ago.
 
Jim
 

OK! Now I'm getting someplace! :) "MixThreadCount" to 4 AND I had to set the Enable set threaded ideal processor to False. the cores  are spread-out better, I'm going to see if I can tweak this setting but it's grate as it now!!
Thanks Jim!      

Bear in mind that if you have a Quad Core system that claims to have 8 cores (eg. the Intel i7), then 4 of those cores are not real - they are 4 cores that are each split into 2 virtual cores that use hyperthreading. As such, although this is better than 4 'plain' cores in almost all cases, you shouldn't expect a 2x speedup relative to an old-style 4-core machine. Typically though, you don't need to worry about that, as I'm sure Sonar will be taking this into account. But possibly you have other, CPU-expensive background processes that don't... check Task Manager and look.
 
There are many reasons why one core is likely to see a lot more CPU use than another, and playing with core parking is just going to move the problem rather than fix it, and potentially make things worse by anchoring certain processes to certain cores even if they would be better off moved.
 
As I mentioned briefly above, setting audio driver latency too low will result in a lot of CPU usage, primarily on one core. There's not much Sonar can do about that since trying to change that dynamically would probably cause ten times more support problems than it solves. But if that's not your problem, then it's probably plugins.
 
For the most part, a single plugin will run on one thread, and nothing you can do will change that. So usually all you can do is find the plugins that take up the most CPU time, and try to reduce this. This might include increasing any internal buffers, disabling any unneeded features, switching to 'low quality' where that is available, etc. Sadly I don't think AD2 offers many of these options.
 
Also, check for 'hidden' plugins like the ProChannel. I'd be very surprised if each instance of the ProChannel didn't run on a different core, but who knows.
 
 

Kylotan
Bear in mind that if you have a Quad Core system that claims to have 8 cores (eg. the Intel i7), then 4 of those cores are not real - they are 4 cores that are each split into 2 virtual cores that use hyperthreading. As such, although this is better than 4 'plain' cores in almost all cases, you shouldn't expect a 2x speedup relative to an old-style 4-core machine. Typically though, you don't need to worry about that, as I'm sure Sonar will be taking this into account. But possibly you have other, CPU-expensive background processes that don't... check Task Manager and look.
 
There are many reasons why one core is likely to see a lot more CPU use than another, and playing with core parking is just going to move the problem rather than fix it, and potentially make things worse by anchoring certain processes to certain cores even if they would be better off moved.
 
As I mentioned briefly above, setting audio driver latency too low will result in a lot of CPU usage, primarily on one core. There's not much Sonar can do about that since trying to change that dynamically would probably cause ten times more support problems than it solves. But if that's not your problem, then it's probably plugins.
 
For the most part, a single plugin will run on one thread, and nothing you can do will change that. So usually all you can do is find the plugins that take up the most CPU time, and try to reduce this. This might include increasing any internal buffers, disabling any unneeded features, switching to 'low quality' where that is available, etc. Sadly I don't think AD2 offers many of these options.
 
Also, check for 'hidden' plugins like the ProChannel. I'd be very surprised if each instance of the ProChannel didn't run on a different core, but who knows.
 
 

I am seeing no core bars hitting the roof or popping on this computer, that's all I cared about.
But you gave me a lot to think about moving ahead on this core stuff. Thanks again! 

It is my understanding that all GUI processes (display) run on Core 0. The actual audio processing will be distributed across cores (depending on settings), but no matter what, the GUI processes for Sonar and plugins will run on Core 0. Sonar does a good job of allocating cores on my I7-5820 (6 cores) but Core 0 is always somewhat hotter in the perf monitor. It is hard to tell exactly by how much since I rarely see more than a pixel or two height in the perf monitor bars.
Not sure how accurate the perf monitor is really since if you go to Task Manager | performance, it seems to indicate more usage than perf monitor (from non-Sonar processes ?) and the core usage seems more even.

I too have finally seen my core usage on core 1 stop hitting the roof by playing with the "MixThreadCount"  AND set the Enable set threaded ideal processor to False (1)
 
My performance test is always with the jumbo projects (47 track etc.) that Sonar used to ship with upgrades.  These always ran a little glitchy, stop and start delays etc.  Now they run awesome.
 
While there may be reasons why this should not work, all I can say is it has worked for me.  Hip Hip Hooray !
 
Thanks !

Glad I was able to help (even though I don't know what I am doing).  All I know is I wanted to make music on my DAW and even though I had a killer machine, it wasn't performing the way I needed it to.
 
I started thinking that the OS was doing a lot of stuff in the background to support SONAR audio and apparently I didn't leave enough CPU for the OS to do its thing.
 
This worked for me and glad to see I was able to share this with some others that it also has worked for.
 
Jim