[BON-7276]Cubase Pro 8 memory leak

Cubase
,
#1

Problem: Cubase 8 needs more and more memory while open.

Test 1:

  1. Open Cubase 8. Do not load a project. Avoid Steinberg Hub.
  2. Look into Windows Task Manager. Write down Cubase8.exe used memory.
  3. Do nothing in Cubase. Wait an hour.
  4. Now look again at the memory.

In my case (Win7 x86, Cubase 32 Bit):
0:00 - 234.700
1:00 - 267.768

That’s 550 KByte/min or 32.3 MByte/hour or 775 MB/day.

Test 2:

  1. Close Cubase 8 completely, wait a minute and open a fresh instance.
  2. Create a new project with “Empty” template.
  3. Add an instrument track, use Drum/Groove Agent SE.
  4. Load a kit, e. g. Init Studio Kit SE.
  5. Look into Windows Task Manager. Write down Cubase8.exe used memory.
  6. Do nothing in Cubase. Wait an hour.
  7. Now look again at the memory.

In my case:
0:00 - 891.652
1:00 - 935.072

That’s 2.1 MByte/min or 128 MB/hour or 3 GB/day.

Please confirm.

#2

I think I have found it. This has something to do with ‘MIDI Retrospective Record’. If I turn off this option, the memory consumption doesn’t increase anymore. If I turn it on, the memory goes up again.

I have a MIDI Keyboard connected (like most of us I think). It seems to send some kind of data that have been dropped in earlier Cubase versions (Active sensing? MIDI Clock? Timecode? Don’t know, MIDI monitor doesn’t show anything). Because of their nature it doesn’t make sense to cache this kind of data at all.

The reason for Test 2 showing even more memory increase could be: I had monitoring for 10 MIDI tracks enabled. So the retrospective record function buffered 10 times more data.

Cubase 5.5, 6.5 and 7.07 behave different.

#3

But if you even not load a Project… what kind of ‘MIDI Retrospective’ is enabled, and engaged to what?

#4

All I can do is describe reproducable symptoms. I think that’s the idea of a issue report forum.

Cubase without project, MIDI retrospective record on => memory increases slowly.
Cubase with project, MIDI retrospective record on => memory increases the faster the more MIDI tracks have ‘Monitor’ enabled.

#5

Very interesting

#6

Sorry, but that doesn’t mean its a memory leak. Its way to small change.
It can be windows components that do all kinds of task in background causing more use of RAM. And the usage of RAM you describe after one hour is still tiny small anyway.

So your main concern should be to update to x64bit Windows edition instead of using windows x32 and Cubase PRO 8 x32. I have 32GB RAM installed that I can use VS you can only use max 1.5 GB RAM = issue. :bulb:


Best regards
Freddie

#7

I think is interesting to talk about anomalies, and this is the propose of this forum. Of course you can also work in a mac and it will be completely different.

#8

I believe I can confirm the issue. I left C8 idle overnight with a small project open, next morning my mem usage had run up to 6 Gb!!! Usually C8 uses up to a total of 3 or 4 Gb in my workflow…

I know often reload a project if I had it idle for a while and see mem usage drop around 2Gb…

#9

Hi guys,

this issue has been entered to our bugbase for investigation. This doesn’t mean it has been confirmed by us, but our developers will take a look at it. I’m moving this thread to the misc so that you can keep reporting your findings. If I get any feedback from the devs, I will let you know.

Regards

#10

Disabling ‘MIDI Retrospective Record’ seems to have fixed my problem too. Thanks a lot for posting this workaround. I recently started running out of RAM on sound design projects and couldn’t figure out where it was going. The only notable things that had changed in my setup was upgrading to Cubase 8 and switching to a Samsung SSD drive. It seemed more likely to be Cubase than the SSD (based on asking other people with the same SSD drive if they had RAM issues), and that assumption seems to be correct.

I mostly use Kontakt, other NI instruments (like FM8, Massive, Reaktor) and various UAD plugins. I’m running Cubase 32bit 8.0.30, Win 7 64bit and have 12 gigs of RAM. I’m happy to run some more tests if Steinberg is interested in investigating this issue.

As a general comment, I’ve generally been displeased with my Cubase 8 experience over the past 6 or so months. I upgraded simply to get the drag n drop feature from MediaBay to Kontakt, but as a trade-off I ran into the following issues:

  • Poor video playback performance, such that I had to downgrade to rather old video card drivers.
  • This RAM issue
  • Overall heavier CPU usage
  • A mixer that I find less efficient to use than the mixer in Cubase 5
  • Broken side-chaining (e.g. with multiband compressors)
  • VST bridge still not being sufficient to let me run the 64bit version of Cubase. I.e. I still use jbridge on occasion to get access to all my RAM, but I lose the drag and drop feature from MediaBay when doing so.
  • Unanswered support tickets
  • More crashes than I recall having with Cubase 5

Sorry for going off-topic, but I wanted to make sure my concerns were voiced somewhere that Steinberg might see them. I hope bug fixing hasn’t stopped on Cubase 8.

Thanks,
Sean