Hi y'all!
 
I've been once again playing with the settings of Sonar, Kontakt (and eventually also win7 and BIOS) hoping to find the best trade off for stability vs. performance.
 
It seems like that on my system K5 works best if I have multiprocessor support active in Sonar (of course) but also in Kontakt (which is not recommended in NI manuals and yield explicit warning messages). However, when setting it to 10 cores in K5 it does indeed work a lot better compared to disabling it (where I get drop-outs and audio engine failures already at a lower load) ...
 
So I wonder is anyone doing likewise / has any other hints on optimizing K5 performance?
 
Another interesting fact, when I disabled core parking for a test K5 seemed to have worked better when turning multiprocessor support in K5 off (compared to core parking active), yet keeping it set to 10 cores in K5 still performs superior ...
 
 
A little more background if you mind:
First of, I'm running a low latency system (ASIO buffers 96 or 128 @ 96 kHz) and it's been good and stable over the past months (so whatever I "complain" about is "complaining at a high level"). However, occasionally I have work sessions where the stability I'm used just disappears and I get a few crashes. Now with monthly updates it's easy to blame Sonar, BUT once again it seems like my old "enemy" K5 has woken and causes hickups ... meaning I have forgotten that when I'm pushing multiple K5 instances towards DAW performance limits I will be asking for trouble ...
 
BTW, there are documented problems in the NI forum that K5 and my Roland interface have some issues (other seem to suffer way more severe, though) ...
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hi,
 
I have multiprocessing enabled in Kontakt 5 and have done for about 3 years with no issues in my system and like you helped alot of performance. My advice is try it and just keep an eye on it over next few days etc. If it all works then your good to go!
 
I have tried this in some computer systems and it didn't like it at all so it seems to be temperamental but I could be wrong
 
Kind Regards
Joe

I've got to say, I'm not experiencing any real problems with Kontakt 5 at all. I let K5 use all my processors and I don't really do any optimising except for the usual make sure there's no wifi running (don't have any on my studio PC).

While my PC started off as a pure DAW only, it now does everything but performance hasn't really changed. Of course if I'm looking to wring every bit of power out of it for the lowest latency I do a bit of housekeeping but generally I can multi task, on the net etc Outlook running, iCloud and Onedrive running in the background and connected to the net via Cat-6 Gigabit network, run Sonar without any hiccups.

The main issue I've had with Kontakt and excessive CPU hogging was with the Abbey Road drums. They used to send my first core quite high and not really balance out with the other cores well. This is on an i7 running Win 7. What I've done to get around that is disable a lot of the built in effects in K's mixer and just use the Pro Channel in SONAR. It seems to work better for me.
 

I had a moderate amount of instability with Kontakt 5, back when I was on Windows 7. It went away when I went to Windows 8. I am presenting this not as a suggestion or anything other than my experience. Maybe that would help someone who knows the ins and outs of W7 and W8 to identify a setting change or the like. I hope this has, at least, the potential to help.

CPU hogging is often caused by the convolution reverb. Disabling it generally fixes everything for me.