Sanderxpander
It sounds to me like either your VSTs are a little buggy...

I think it rather boils down to "my VSTs are demanding". I like em like that.
 
Seriously, Falcon and Iris became my go-to synths and samplers (and Neutron my default channel strip), you can do such complex stuff, at the same time you can actually "jam" with em in realtime if you learned how to use them.
 
I understand not many people have these plugins cause they are expensive, or people are making different kind of music. Cause otherwise I could provide a project file that's causing issues and other people could test it with their system. The only chance to find out what's actually going on. But an educated guess might be, if e.g. only Falcon causes pops & crackles at a lower buffer rate it's probably because Falcon and not the rest of the system.

I use Iris all the time and have no such issues. Neutron too. Not familiar with Falcon, but I have plenty of other demanding synths and plugs like Diva and Ozone which I use.

It's of course possible to max out the system this way (especially at the lowest buffer sizes) but I generally don't get random dropouts or popping and crackling when using them - not without the CPU meter being way up there anyway. I've never needed to go above 512 samples using my Fireface UCX and that's during the mixing stage with a pretty full project.

Sanderxpander
I use Iris all the time and have no such issues. Neutron too. Not familiar with Falcon, but I have plenty of other demanding synths and plugs like Diva and Ozone which I use.

It's of course possible to max out the system this way (especially at the lowest buffer sizes) but I generally don't get random dropouts or popping and crackling when using them - not without the CPU meter being way up there anyway. I've never needed to go above 512 samples using my Fireface UCX and that's during the mixing stage with a pretty full project.

 
Well I've read quite a few statements like that, but the devil is in the details. I'm not just using Iris, I'm using 20 tracks of Iris 2 + Neutron + FX / Falcon + Neutron + FX + LP EQ, MB and AD on the master bus (set to non-linear while mixing). This is my default template. In Falcon I work with layers of synths, samples, IRCAM algos, more FX, oversampling, younameit.

Been following the Studio Tour of JunkieXL on Youtube. He's got 6 VST-Servers, the main machine running Cubase has 5 DSP cards with dedicated plugins that run on the cards, a separate machine with ProTools that handles all cinematic stuff when he's working on scores. Not to mention estimated 100qm² of hardware synths & samplers.
 
Pretty much any computational task you can "outsource" from your DAW he has outsourced. It kinda speaks for it's own.
 
EDIT: I wonder what it might take to have an Amazon EC2-Server as VST-Server. VST-Power on demand, you only pay what you use, scalable to infinity. Dafq this would be awesome. Let's create this! Latency might be a small issue
 
EDIT: Opening a lot of bottles here, but what about CUDA and OpenCL? I thought this was in the making already?

occide

Sanderxpander
I use Iris all the time and have no such issues. Neutron too. Not familiar with Falcon, but I have plenty of other demanding synths and plugs like Diva and Ozone which I use.

It's of course possible to max out the system this way (especially at the lowest buffer sizes) but I generally don't get random dropouts or popping and crackling when using them - not without the CPU meter being way up there anyway. I've never needed to go above 512 samples using my Fireface UCX and that's during the mixing stage with a pretty full project.

 
Well I've read quite a few statements like that, but the devil is in the details. I'm not just using Iris, I'm using 20 tracks of Iris 2 + Neutron + FX / Falcon + Neutron + FX + LP EQ, MB and AD on the master bus (set to non-linear while mixing). This is my default template. In Falcon I work with layers of synths, samples, IRCAM algos, more FX, oversampling, younameit.

So you're basically trying to get dropouts on purpose? I don't think I've ever used 20 instances of Iris in a single project but surely even if you do, there's no need to make that your starting point? I guess we do have a vastly different "arranging" ethos, which is fine of course. I'd be interested to hear some of your music though, it would help me understand.

Regardless of all that, are you getting these dropouts without CPU (or disk i/o) spiking or having them sustained near maximum load?

Sanderxpander
So you're basically trying to get dropouts on purpose? I don't think I've ever used 20 instances of Iris in a single project but surely even if you do, there's no need to make that your starting point? I guess we do have a vastly different "arranging" ethos, which is fine of course. I'd be interested to hear some of your music though, it would help me understand.

Regardless of all that, are you getting these dropouts without CPU (or disk i/o) spiking or having them sustained near maximum load?

No, why would I? I'm using templates for their purpose, to save time. Also I don't use 20 instances of Iris, I meant 20 in total, usual it's about 10-15 Falcon, 5 Iris, 5 other synth or drum machine, sometimes more, sometimes less.
 
Thanks for asking about my music, I definitely want to share / show some songs, also in the context of my forum posts about my issues. But I'm pretty busy working most of the week, and also dealing with the technical issues takes time away. So atm only one (1) song is finished :D about 3 are in the oven and need some stirring. Got some older songs, but those where more "getting to know the matter again" - I didn't make music for over a decade.
 
My arranging ethos - I need to save time. I want to jam sometimes, quickly create a song in less than an hour, including some of the instruments and the mix. Other times I'm happy with working on a single sound design for a week. I guess my working ethos pretty much reflects JunkieXL I mentioned before, I want to have the stuff I work with at my fingertips, immediately, as little boundaries as possible.
(Although I have to admit I never was a big fan of his tunes in the past. You should definitely check his youtube channel, that guy has grown up and worked incredibly hard, more than most of em and not only deserves a ton of respect for that but also is an inspiration.) 
 
EDIT: The pops and crackles I was talking about with Falcon at a lower buffer size, there's no noticable load or spike on any component. 

I know JunkieXL, he's Dutch actually and teaches (or used to?) over here.

I guess if you want to use a lot of the most CPU intensive softsynths at the same time you'll need a very fast and well tuned system. What I'm trying to get at is whether you get dropouts in a full project when CPU is near max or whether they occur just "randomly" with little CPU load. The latter shouldn't happen and seems like an issue with a plugin (Falcon?) or a DPC latency issue.

Sanderxpander
I know JunkieXL, he's Dutch actually and teaches (or used to?) over here.

I guess if you want to use a lot of the most CPU intensive softsynths at the same time you'll need a very fast and well tuned system. What I'm trying to get at is whether you get dropouts in a full project when CPU is near max or whether they occur just "randomly" with little CPU load. The latter shouldn't happen and seems like an issue with a plugin (Falcon?) or a DPC latency issue.

Like I said, in a full projects Falcon pops a little till 1024 samples, then stops popping completely. CPU load is barely noticeable, no spikes. At my current project this only occurs at the loop-point of Sonar, so clear audio till end of loop, but then a pop when it jumps to the beginning of the loop, only on Falcon. Other than that I can go down to 256 samples in the same project, don't have other issues there*.
 
In a workload-test I can drive all 8 cores (resp. latency meters) up to 70% at 1024 samples until I get a real dropout. This workload equals about 48 fully loaded channels. The RME performs a bit better in this test, but not much.
 
*EDIT: Well that was actually wrong. I DO have other issues there, especially with the RME now. Sometimes when I work on Falcon or Neutron while Playback, Sonar seems to lose "sync", the tracks play out of order, or one instrument only plays one continuous note. That barely happened with the M-Audio.

That sounds more like a midi buffers issue to be honest. Might have to figure out the optimal setting there. Also, loops give me issues too, some softsynths and fx just really don't like them, especially those with look-ahead buffers. Not sure if this is unique to Sonar or softsynths.

Neutron had a few issues when it came out I think. Make sure you have the latest versions of Falcon and Neutron and hope for updates. If you barely get CPU load you shouldn't get dropouts at all.

Sanderxpander
That sounds more like a midi buffers issue to be honest. Might have to figure out the optimal setting there. Also, loops give me issues too, some softsynths and fx just really don't like them, especially those with look-ahead buffers. Not sure if this is unique to Sonar or softsynths.

Neutron had a few issues when it came out I think. Make sure you have the latest versions of Falcon and Neutron and hope for updates. If you barely get CPU load you shouldn't get dropouts at all.

The great question remains, how to improve this? I've been playing with settings and buffer (also midi buffers) up and down without any real difference. All assistance would be highly appreciated!