robert_e_bone
I would just like to see a test of the load of that instrument into an instance of Kontakt, in and of itself.

The instrument loads without crashing in Kontakt standalone.

Anderton
Your saying that it crashes about half the time may mean there is something about your system that's "on the edge." I don't know if X3e loads more "stuff" into memory than X2; if you ran programs prior to opening Sonar, sometimes they don't release memory fully. If Sonar had a bug caused by loading large files, it would seem that it would happen every time. If Sonar can load files smaller than a certain size without errors, it would seem whatever the problem is relates to file size.
 

I've opened up the Windows task manager to monitor memory usage. Windows indicates baseline memory usage of 2.9GB in use and 5.1 GB available.

When I open X3 with a blank project, it uses 125 MB of memory. When I insert an instance of Kontakt, Sonar's memory usage goes up to 227 MB. If Kontakt crashes while loading this instrument, Sonar's memory usage tops out at 460 MB. But if I'm able to load the instrument without crashing, Sonar's memory usage get to 677 MB.

This is consistent with running Kontakt in standalone mode. Before loading the instrument Kontakt uses 85 MB. After loading the instrument it uses 535 MB.

In both cases, when the instrument loads successfully it takes up about 450 MB. But when it crashes in Sonar it uses only 233 MB. To me this indicates that Kontakt is having trouble loading the instrument in Sonar. I can see Kontakt's dialog indicating that it is loading the samples. It's after that dialog goes away, but before the instrument GUI is displayed, that the crash occurs.
 

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I'm trying out each of them and reporting back what happens.

Please do let us know the results of what you find. Although you mention this as Kontakt-specific, perhaps those using MachFive or other samplers could benefit from whatever you find. Unfortunately (or actually, fortunately) I can't reproduce the problem here and can load anything Kontakt throws at Sonar so I can't be of much help.
 
One question remains: If you keep loading instruments into Kontakt until you do run out of memory, does it generate the same error message? NI might find that information helpful. 

Make sure to follow the instructions is the crash dialog. Send the crash log to NI Tech Support.

Is multi core enabled in kontakt?

lawp
Is multi core enabled in kontakt?

Multicore is on in Sonar and off in Kontakt. Switching it doesn't seem to have an effect.

scook
Make sure to follow the instructions is the crash dialog. Send the crash log to NI Tech Support.

I sent it to them about a week ago, but haven't heard back, so I decided to ask this forum instead to get some fresh ideas.

Thanks for the additional tests - I will scratch my noggin for a while and see if anything comes to mind.
 
Please list your computer specs - CPU type, memory, etc - you can look at my signature at the bottom of this post for an idea - ideally you will want to add your specs to your forum signature, so that folks can get an idea of what you are running with when they are trying to help you debug some weirdness.  :)
 
I am encouraged that it loads into Kontakt in stand-alone mode, it's a good start.
 
By the way, Kontakt supports loading multiple instruments into a single instance of it, but I do not believe you can take advantage of that with simple instrument tracks.  This doesn't pertain to your problem, but I thought I would suggest you consider using regular separate audio and midi tracks - particularly for synths like Kontakt.
 
Thanks, 
 
Bob Bone
 

I think I might have identified the problem. It seems to be caused by either Kontakt or Sonar processing mouse events during the instrument load.
 
Crashes are likely to occur when I load the instrument by double clicking or dragging with the mouse. But if I load the instrument by selecting it and pressing enter on the keyboard instead, everything is fine. I haven't been able to make it crash once out of about 30 tries when using the keyboard to load a Kontakt instrument patch.
 
I also tried making Kontakt crash in X2a and in standalone mode by using the mouse, but it won't crash. The only times I can make it crash is when loading a Kontakt patch in in X3e using the mouse.