Recommend upgrading to Windows 10 which has been optimized for MIDI use, especially if you're running a hundred MIDI tracks.  

Zargg
Hi. Have you tried yo increase the "Prepare using ...ms" in Preferences, MIDI, Playback and Recording to 500? It changed in Platinum, IIRC.
All the best.

At 500 it's very slightly better, but I still get the same problems - just not quite as bad. At 1000 it's worse than at 250. Strangely, in all cases, playing it repeatedly causes more dropouts each time. I've never seen that before from SONAR.
 

Anonymungus!
Recommend upgrading to Windows 10 which has been optimized for MIDI use, especially if you're running a hundred MIDI tracks.  

That's a possibility. First I want to see what a memory upgrade does.
 

billclarkmusic

Zargg
Hi. Have you tried yo increase the "Prepare using ...ms" in Preferences, MIDI, Playback and Recording to 500? It changed in Platinum, IIRC.
All the best.

At 500 it's very slightly better, but I still get the same problems - just not quite as bad. At 1000 it's worse than at 250. Strangely, in all cases, playing it repeatedly causes more dropouts each time. I've never seen that before from SONAR.
 

It is not a one size fits all. Try different settings. Higher is not necessarily better.
All the best.

What are using for a soundcard ?
I did have an issue like this recently and for me it turned out to be my Anti virus.
It was so bad I could literally hear my I7 crying it was winding so hard.
my best guess is the plug ins were throwing off a PUP warning and my AV was scanning it each time.
but it didn't show up in TM. so I had no idea what it was.
I added an exception for Sonars plug in folder locations, the Plug in scanner, the EXE...everything I could think of and the next time I re booted my PC it was gone. absolutely fine.
 
You might be able to go through one by one and load each plug in seeing if its one plug in that is the offender.
Open Sonar in safe mode (Hold down SHIFT while opening Sonar).
This might help you narrow down if one plug in is the offender. I wouldn't even think RAM has anything to do with it.
I load a ton of SS and sometimes have 50+ tracks loaded with plug ins and im only using 16GB of RAM.

Solved -- by adding another 32gb of RAM. Everything plays fine now.
 
When it's all loaded up, RAM usage goes to 54%. So previously, it was wanting to use 108% of the available memory, it couldn't do it, and the symptoms I saw were the result. 
 
It must be that Platinum is a bit more memory-hungry than X2. Hopefully this thread will be of use to some future user who has a similarly crazy number of Kontakt instances. 
 
Thanks to all for your suggestions. I learned some useful things.
 
Bill

Wow, you needed 64GB to run smoothly.
 
This is a first here, AKAIK.

JonD
Wow, you needed 64GB to run smoothly.
 
This is a first here, AKAIK.

75 Kontakt instances and 16 EWQLSO instances... that's a first for me as well. It's a bit of an experiment, and I'm not going to keep all of them, but I want the ability to A/B test a bunch them in different combinations. Now that I have enough RAM, I can even consider throwing in a few more. ;)

This is one of the craziest things I've ever heard.
(75 Instances of Kontakt, plus 16 EWQLSO)
Would a real life situation would ever call for something like this ?

It would not been at the top of my suggestions, to have to increase RAM to double of a
what you had 
Glad you got it working