Performance Question

Backstory-
My buddy created a project that was running into some glitches, he is pretty new to Sonar so we decided to put his project in a bundle file and bring it to my house and try it out on my set up (to verify and test these 'glitches').  He is using an intel i5 built by Mr. Roseberry with 4 gigs of RAM.  Nothing to sneeze at but not a 6 core with SSD drives.
 
So we upload the project to my computer (his song so far is roughly 15 minutes long but he only gave me the the INTRO which is 4+ minutes).  As soon as I loaded this project which took several minutes I realized the enormous project he is doing.  My computer was literally trying to tap out as the tracks loaded themselves one after another, I could almost hear it crying.  I upped my buffers to over 1K in my sound card to play it back.  The Sonar CPU meter was jumping around 50% while the disk usage meter was jumping around wildly.  He had 100+ tracks, within most of the tracks he had 10's of tracks layers.  We are EASILY talking 500 tracks in some parts.  He had 60 or so softsynths, all of them Sonar native TTS-1,Roland GrooveSynths, SessionDrummer etc...  He had some effects on busses and clips but not too many for the size of the project.
 
2 questions I have are
1) This project gave me several drop outs, is this due to processing power for all these tracks and softsynths or is this more Harddrive (standard 7200 speed) issue as a bottleneck for all these tracks (Both of us have dedicated audio harddrives)
2)  Does the LENGTH of a project matter in playback.  Meaning we only played his first 4 minutes on my computer and I had some issues, would it be any worse to load the whole 15 minutes? 
 
I am trying to advise him of his best bet for workflow, if he should chop his project down into small increments or if it matter if he is working on the intro with the entire project loaded.
 
Thanks for any advice
-Mike

You think 60 soft synths (tts-1 and roland groovesynth) are more on your system then 500 audio tracks?  My normal projects can have 30 softsynths and if I start loading too many sounds in each then Ill get crackles before I get any dropouts, I start freezing at that point. 

As stated above, to play my friends project without pops,crackles and constant dropouts I upped the latency to over 1K.  It's not so much a problem for me as this is not my project, I am more curious to learn what part of the computer bottlenecks such a huge project with over 500 audio tracks (thats including track layers)  And, if the length of a project matters..is it more strain on playback for a 3 minute project vs a 25 minute project?

I have read that hard drives can determine track count, but that was a while back and I could of misinterpreted, which is why I asked about the 7200 Seagate Drive being able to handle the track count.

Thanks for your thoughts Roger, I am aware of the latency settings and freezing.  At this point I am sure that there is nothing I would be able to do with my computer to play his 15 minute full project...I actually wonder how many computers could, and now realize why his computer crashes and freezes alot with this project
-Mike

/Bump for an answer

What does a computer need to playback several hundred tracks of audio and midi (not all playing at once)
Is a Raid array set up the only way to get this done? 

Assuming that the harddrive is the bottleneck in this scenerio before the CPU

Thanks for your response Scott, the synths my friend is currently using in his project are mostly native Sonar (TTS-1, Roland GrooveSynth) + Addictive Drums.  I will show him your suggestion about the raid array set up 
-Mike

Guitarhacker


Mike....  500 tracks? 60 synths? are you for real?

Just kidding... yeah, that's gonna take some serious computing power just to run without dropping.

I'd convert the synths to audio tracks (bounce to track) and then save it to a new project without the synths... just audio tracks.

Another option start writing country, where 12 tracks will "git r done"!

I was thinking the same thing!
Just managing a project like that must be a nightmare!

+1 on the convert the synths to audio.