Ok. Anyone have any ideas about this weirdness?
I started a new project using all my normal templates, procedures etc. After I had about 6 x 4 bar loops written I noticed my Disk Load was peaking and sometimes stopping the Audio Engine altogether. On average it was between 65% and 90%. I have a quad core with 16gb ram machine so this shouldn't happen at all. As an experiment I closed that project and opened one of my finished projects that had about 30 tracks and lots of processor heavy FX etc. Disk load was between 1 and 5%. No problems, glitches, dropouts.
So I re-opened the troublesome project, copied the audio files and dropped them in to a brand new project. Now the disk load is between 1% and 3%. I have no idea what happened. It's solved I guess, but it is still bugging my why this happened.
Any thoughts Cakewalk gurus??

RAM and CPU speed won't have much bearing on disk usage; audio tracks are always streamed from disk with only minimal buffering to RAM. Any chance some other disk-intensive operation coincidentally got started at the same time? Or possibly you have a "green" disk drive that got stuck in a power-saving mode...? And both copies of the project were on the same disk?
 
 

That sheds a bit of light on it. I really am stumped. Like I said it seems to be solved but it had me banging my head against the wall haha.
 

Hi,do you have X3e update?
If not you should install it,second,you can try to load your prj in safe mode,couse we always think that is a sonar related problem,but this kind of problems is mostly related to proj's plugs.
Third,there is a feature in AUD.ini called thread scheduling model ,check if the value is 2 that is the right value for multicore cpu.
The last,turn off all save power cpu feature in your MB bios and in W7 preferences.
Good luck

Ok, I recreated the exact same situation.
 
It seems if you defragment the drive you have Sonar X3 on and don't reboot, it can cause this problem. I recreated it twice. I had defragged just before the problem arose so by process of elimination I went through the changes on my PC and ended up with the defrag thing. I am not 100% it was the reason because obviously once you defrag it takes a bit of messing about to defrag again so the conditions were not perfect for a recreation, but fingers crossed all seems ok now. Thanks for the tips guys.

I hadnt changed the threadschedulingmodel. I have now. Will see if this changes things at all. Thanks.

brundlefly
RAM and CPU speed won't have much bearing on disk usage; audio tracks are always streamed from disk with only minimal buffering to RAM.

i'd like to see "intelligent" buffering - in these days of 16 & even 32 gigs of ram being not uncommon, it seems a no-brainer to load everything (everything?! well, as much as possible) into ram, or am i missing something?

This came up a while ago. My answer from the other thread:
 
I don't think there's much incentive to pre-load a lot of track audio data into RAM. It would just take that much longer for projects to initialize and be ready start playback. And the time to switch projects or move around in a much larger project that can't all fit in RAM would just be that much greater as the amount of data needing to be swapped increased. Given that a moderately high-performing disk system with dedicated drives for audio and possibly samples should have no trouble keeping up with the demand of a large project, letting HDD handle the audio streaming load and reserving RAM for plugins and non-disk-streaming samplers that need instant access is way to go.

fair enough; it seems the only(?) downside is the loading/unloading time? all other actions would be performed on in-memory data, so certainly in my own circumstances it would be of benefit :-) i feel a feature request coming on...