7.0.3 Hangups on Opening/Closing Projects

This post relates to another thread regarding Cubase hanging up during project close/exit but it also involves opening projects so I thought it better to post it in a new thread.

I have been trying to understand why some of my projects will not load on first try in 7.0.3 and, for that matter, close without hanging up Cubase. They tend to always open on the second try which suggests some sort of i/o contention. After examining the open file handles I noticed that the Music Lab VSTI’s have multiple file handles for each instrument:

Real Guitar: 66 Handles
Real LPC: 66 Handles

I have no idea what the thinking is in terms of why multiple handles exist but I believe it may have something to do with optimizing i/o such that each handle points to a different set of samples. In any event, I noticed that without the guitar VSTIs the incidence of issues was somewhat reduced. Both Retrologue and ‘The Grand’ VSTIs were causing problems as well even though they both appear to consume only one file handle each.

On the supposition that the root cause of these open project/close project issues is related to comparatively high disk latency I installed an SSD and restored the Windows 7 64 image to it since which time I have had no issues opening and closing projects. My guess is that Steinberg sets demanding limits on disk i/o latency to ensure disk read/writes can keep up with a demanding workload and if a particular file operation does not complete within a specific amount of time it throws exceptions.

Thus far it appears that the SSD has cleared up all my project open/close crashes.