daveny5
I don't believe plug-ins necessarily chew up that much RAM. Windows could be swapping some of that into the paging file. Audio tracks do take up a lot of RAM. I don't think that's what's causing the pops and clicks though. What do you have your ASIO buffer size set to? What bit depth and sample rate are you using? Maybe you should try turning off the Windows paging file and see if that makes it use more RAM. 

Okay, I tried turning off the pagefile, but my problem hasn't gone away.  Sonar still hits the ceiling at about 1.5 GB of RAM.  
 
Thank you so much for your time and effort, by the way, I really appreciate it.

jscomposer
I use those same plugins, and they actually don't use a ton of RAM. I use a lot of Play instances (Eastwest) and they chew up a lot....up to 32GB depending on the project.
 
Do you have any other programs running in the background on Windows? Have you tried updating your M-audio driver to the latest 64bit version?

Hmm, I should try that out sometime. 
 
And yes, I have updated to the latest 64-bit driver. 
 
The thing is, even though Sonar isn't using up a lot of RAM, it still seems to need RAM, because the latency starts lagging and the occasional pops and clicks start coming in.  
 
Thanks for your response.

When the project gets a bit heavy I usually freeze the synths I am not practicing or recording to free up  resources.
 
Also if you have added and audio effects that reply on pdc that can cause issues as well.
 
I don't think what you are experiencing is the result of memory but more likely processor.

I agree with Tom. A ton of ram only helps a little.
You are.more likely limited by a.combination of cpu, audio interface and drivers. Devices do have a limit and when you reach it, pops and crackles result.

Hi and welcome here.
 
Have you thought just about a test project were  to plug in  synths and fxs which are
heavy CPU ressource hungry ? One after the other till your machine dies?
I would be curious about your result!
I want to do that with my new machine the next days..
Have fun 
Pragi

I agree as well about the extra RAM. I doubled mine from 8 to 16Gigs and witnessed no improvement. I know this is all mostly CPU and I/O intensive, more so than RAM, but If a song could fit entirely into RAM, that would be cool.
 
I'm wondering if freezing tracks, or bounce-to-clips to reduce the FX overhead would allow Sonar to store the audio in RAM?

Usually to fix the recently described issues would be to adjust interface buffers or freeze tracks. If there are a lot of plug-ins there is an adjustment that can be made to the AUD.INI described here that might make a different.

If there are audio tracks (or frozen synth tracks): the buffering of audio data on playback is controlled by the hard disk buffer size. Increasing these values will cause sonar to preload more audio track data into memory. See the lower half of the page linked below:
 
http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/kb/reader.aspx/2007013007
 
 

DreamForecast
 I open up Task Manager to see how much RAM is being used, and by golly, only around 1.5 GB of RAM.  My plug-ins (which are also 64-bit, by the way), are begging to have more RAM but perhaps Sonar X2, the host, is refusing it.  
 

It seems there may be two issues here that may not be related. One is that you are having clicks and pops (presumably from dropouts) and the other is that you do not believe working random access memory is being assigned to Sonar and the various plugins appropriately.

How did you determine that your plugins are begging for memory?

slartabartfast
It seems there may be two issues here that may not be related. One is that you are having clicks and pops (presumably from dropouts) and the other is that you do not believe working random access memory is being assigned to Sonar and the various plugins appropriately.

How did you determine that your plugins are begging for memory?

1. I think you may be right.  However, despite the pops and clicks, I am not getting dropouts, which is weird.
2. I think the plug-ins need memory because
- they keep killing notes when I play too much (though those are fully polyphonic synths).  Also, there is a crackle sometimes when I play them. 
- a latency delay starts to develop (now I'm not sure if this is related to RAM or Sonar or soundcard -- sorry for being such a noob and thanks for putting up with it xD)
 
Yeah...