One-time or short-term spikes are nothing to be concerned about, just as one-time CPU or paging spikes are not an indication of a problem.
As a program starts up or shuts down, it's likely performing some time-consuming task that's temporarily preventing other deferred procedures from executing, resulting in a short-term latency spike.
What you're interested in is the average latency while SONAR is running, and any
periodic (recurring) spikes that might be caused by some non-audio interface activity such as a wireless network adapter continually broadcasting its presence.