I’m working on a project in Cubase 13 Pro, win 10 PC that is suffering from extreme disk cache overload to the point where it has become unworkable. There’s a lot of tracks, but nothing I don’t think that my system hasn’t handled before.
I took a look at Task manager and I’m seeing 85% CPU, 48% memory, 21% disk, 25 GPU
I’m using a Steinberg MR816x which uses FW ASIO , buffer set at 544 samples with 13ms latency
Does anybody have any idea how I could fix this situation? All suggestions welcome!
What is telling you that it’s disk cache overload specifically?
At 85% of total cpu use in task manager I would guess one of the cores is likely to be peaking…..you can see individual core load in windows resource monitor.
To follow on from @Grim , if your average CPU consumption is 85%, most of your cores will be at or near 100%, as Cubase generally avoids Core 0. Are you sure this is disk related?
Every time I press play, the disk cache monitor level shoots up to maximum. I checked Task Monitor just to see what was happening with the project, which is when I spotted those CPU levels. I’m not really running any VSTs or instruments, just a bunch of audio tracks. I’ve had the occasional spike before on other projects but nothing problematic, I just can’t understand what is causing this particular project to malfunction so drastically.
Does the disk cache indicator stay high or does it just spike briefly and then drop back down?
Are you using any external drives or using files stored on Onedrive?
The audio tracks themselves are unlikely to drive up the CPU usage (unless there are a heck of a lot of them). It’s more likely to be the plugins you’re using on those tracks.
What sample rate are you using?
What’s your machine config? (CPU, memory, disks, mobo.)
Yes, disk cache stays at maximum or thereabouts which leads to all the dropouts.
Like I said, little to no plug ins, this is actually the very early stages of the project. There are quite a few audio tracks, something like 50-60, but most are muted and in any case, nothing I haven’t done before on multiple occasions.
The PC itself is quite old, at least ten years (or more), but sturdy. 16gb RAM, Intel i7-2600K 3.40 Ghz four cores. I have three drives, 250GB SSD with Cubase, 2TB for songs etc 2TB SSD for audio. This last one is quite full at 1.5TB
I use 44.1 sample rate. The asio drivers have given me problems in the past because the Steinberg MR816 is firewire and this requires a firewire adapter card, which requires quite specific drivers to prevent pops and glitches, but it’s working correctly from what i can tell.
Do you have a secondary drive with Windows? Can you switch to that and run Cubase and your project there to see if you will have the same results?
Could be a hardware problem.
@somecomposer has a point and it’s worth investigating.
Is this problem only happening on one project?
If so, what happens if you keep muting tracks? Do you get to a point where the disk cache stops peaking?
Just to add to what others have said with respect to potential hardware problems, since you’re on Windows, you might try installing CrystalDiskInfo (which is free) to check the health of your drives. While 50-60 concurrent tracks sounds like a lot to me, and plugins could explain the high CPU levels (which seem like they’d more likely be a problem than 21% disk, unless perhaps all that 21% is on one drive and the 21% is an average across all drives), I’ve seen past problems with failing (hard) drives where CrystalDiskInfo was very helpful in confirming that the issues I was having were with a drive (and moving the project to another drive was a temporary workaround while waiting for a replacement drive). (I even saw issues where freezing tracks with inserts could actually make for more issues than having live virtual instruments and plugins running at the time.)
I’ve had minor issues in the past, but they mostly made sense and I was able to fix them. With this project as is, muting tracks makes no difference, but the project was working perfectly when there were less tracks initially,
I do have CrystalDiskinfo installed and the drives were all reported as in good health.
As I mentioned before, hardly any plug ins running, although I’ll check to see if there are any and try removing them in case something is corrupted.
So even if you mute every track there is no change?
Is it possible for you to post a short video with the Cubase performance monitor visible while the project is playing?
Also, are you familiar with the resource monitor in Task Manager? The one that shows the individual core utilisation. It would also be useful to see what that looks like while the project is playing. Screenshot of this will do, video not necessary.
I’m mindful of the age of your processor, and 50 to 60 tracks of audio might be a strain.
This will sound weird but please try it.
Please open the Studio → Audio Connections → Outputs
and create a new output bus there. It does not need to be connected.
Right click the new bus and select it to become your main mix output.
Then right click on the bus you were actually using as the main mix and make it your main mix again.
Does that solve the disk cache peaking?
I also took a screenshot of the resource monitor while running the project.
I took a closer look at the project and I had massively underestimated the number of audio tracks. There were 160, including three instances of Kontakt. I deleted about 20 tracks and I think it improved playback slightly.
Hi, I tried your suggestion, created the new bus then made the original bus my main mix again. The only thing I did differently was that I did connect the bus, but in any case it didn’t solve the issue, unfortunately.
Hmmm, I don’t pretend to be Mr Expert, after all, I am a user with basic knowledge, but I think this is a HD issue.
Real Time, ASIO-Guard, and Peak are very healthy. Maybe your drive can’t handle all these audio tracks. Try disabling (not deleting) tracks and see at which point your drive can deal with all these audio files.
Wait, I hadn’t thought of trying this because I didn’t know it was possible. It’s possible to disable tracks without actually deleting them? A lot of them are going to go eventually, I’m basically just auditioning a lot of variations on sound at the moment.
That’s task manager and only shows overall cpu - Resource monitor shows each cores loading.
To disable tracks right click in tcp and disable selected tracks.
Oh yeah. Right Click to a track you would like to disable, check out the menu, and you will see “Disadle Track”. I created a keyboard shortcut, in my genious I used the letter ‘D’ for ‘Disable’ 
I use this option very often as sometimes I bounce VSTis to Audio files and then disable the VSTi tracks to lighten up the burden on my RAM/CPU.
Hope this helps.
FWIW, you can also show the individual CPUs in Task Manager. I don’t recall if you do it the same way in Windows 10 (though I know it can be done because I used the setting), but, in Windows 11, you just right click on the graphs in the CPU portion of the Performance tab, select “Change graph to”, then selected “Logical processors” instead of “Overall utilization”:
Of course, Resource Monitor can give additional information. I especially like Resource Monitor for monitoring disk usage to help detect which processes are using the most disk, what is having long response times, etc.
