Sonar performance and multi-core utilization

Preferences->Audio->Playback and Recording.  Check box "Use Multiprocessing Engine". If you are up to date with September's update (IIRC) there is also a new feature Plug-in Load Balancing.

I already had Use Multiprocessing Engine checked. I added Plug In Load Balancing.
 
I think the recording and playback are working OK, but I'm seeing low performance on audio import and export. Are they multi-thread optimized?

One positive finding - I found when I export three tracks simultaneously (separately, not mixed down), Sonar will use three CPUs, each at about 4%, for a total of 12%.  So it is multi-threading, but still not taking advantage of the processing power available.
Export Audio is a single-threaded task - you get a spinning cursor and can't do anything else with Sonar while it is running. If 88% of the CPU power is available, and no other applications are using it, why doesn't Sonar use more CPU and get the job done faster? It is not limited by the disk.

timg11why doesn't Sonar use more CPU and get the job done faster?

old code that would be cumbersome to update

Maybe the particular jobs you are looking at are just not CPU intensive. The 12% behavior could happen if there is nothing much in the way of effects so the whole task is waiting for reading audio from disk or writing a long audio file.
 
In one of your examples, exporting multiple tracks may be bound by disk input and there is not much processing to be done. So it is multithreaded, but not much for each processor to do.
 
Normalizing a track requires disk reading and writing the whole track and very little CPU, so no multithreading would help.
 
Your import MP3 example is a single-threaded task by nature and is probably limited by disk I/O, not needing the CPU much for decoding. Besides waiting for the MP3 to be read from disk, there can also be a limit for writing the decoded data to disk, depending on how much buffering is available. Decoding an MP3 writes much more data than it reads. For a very large MP3, there will definitely be a disk writing limit.
 
In general, it's possible that the kind of jobs you are waiting for would be sped up much more by an SSD rather than more RAM or a faster CPU. If you had a slower CPU, you would see a higher utilization percentage but probably no slowdown for these jobs.
 
The momentary freezes etc. are most likely OS or hardware problems that need study.

timg11
I'm still not seeing proper use of multi-core, or even one core, for compute-limited tasks. (@jimkleban, I am not using the built in graphics in the Intel chipset- I have a separate NVIDIA video card)
 
Example Scenario:  File / Import Audio.  Import a 1 hour long MP3 file (44 khz stereo).
On a 4 GHz i7-6700, this takes about 20 seconds.
Resource Monitor shows processor utilization of about 3%.  Detailed CPU view shows one core at about 50%, others unused.
 
Example Scenario: Normalize Track.  Takes about 10 seconds
Resource Monitor shows processor utilization of about 2.5%.  Detailed CPU view shows one core at about 50%, others unused.
 
What am I missing? Why is the CPU underutilized? I know multi-processing is not perfect, and I won't see 8 cores at 100%, but I expect better than 5% total CPU utilization while I'm sitting waiting for a single-threaded (UI blocking) task.
 
 

Have you tried this? https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/
 
I've been using it and have had a solid and marked performance increase. It's all about spreading the load out over your cores. Maybe it's working in addition to recent CW adding "load balancing." Not sure, as I'm not a big techie. All I know is it's been working great for me. Your mileage may vary... there's a free version and pro version for about 10 dollars.

timg11
The task is pretty simple: import one 44.1Khz stereo MP3 file of about 1 hours length into one Sonar track. No plug-ins. I can copy the source MP3 file (650 Mbytes) to another folder in 2-3 seconds, but Sonar takes 20 

Copying a file from one directory to another on the same drive is just re-write of the file system tables; little or no data are moved. Importing an MP3 to SONAR requires reading the compressed file from disk, decoding it, writing an uncompressed .WAV file to disk, calculating transient marker locations, and writing picture files to the picture cache. The two operations are not remotely comparable.