Interesting. I’ll check back with you again in a week and see if it continues to make a difference for you. I have 32 gigs which should be way more than enough. I would hate this bug in Cubase to have to make me buy another 32 gigs of RAM for no other reason than to avoid something that shouldn’t happen in the first place – that just ain’t right.
And this might prove that it IS a memory dumping issue - something isn’t dumping all of the RAM in between loading projects. Since you have so much RAM right now, that temporary overload doesn’t hit your 64gb ceiling, I bet. Although, your friend has 32 gigs like I do, and he doesn’t experience the issue with huge sessions for some reason. I wonder how big his sessions are, though?
Since no other DAW I’ve ever owned or demoed had this issue between large projects, it seems to be a problem with Cubase.
Yeah, I mean we probably haven’t proven anything yet, other than Cubase has a serious issue with loading large sessions one after the other, and more RAM and more powerful CPU’s do seem to help.
But I’ll report back if anything changes for sure!
Hi,
While you wait for the issue to be addressed by Steinberg (could be a long time), I wondered if you could clear the memory another way. I’ve found a small app you could try, or there is also a Terminal command:
http://www.activata.co.uk/ifreemem/
That one seems quite old now, but may work. Or there’s another one on the Mac App store called “Memory Clean”.
I would be interested to know if this helps at all.
Kind regards,
Darren
Thanks, Darren - I’m gonna give one of those a try. It will help figure out if the RAM thing is the issue.
Relieved to hear that others are experiencing this too. It drives me crazy and puts a stake in the heart of fast workflow when you’re switching between large projects all day like I do as well. My producer collaborator is on Cubase on Windows 10, and he says that this has been a problem for many years on Cubase for him. So it’s definitely a Mac AND Windows issue.
Let’s get more attention on this!
Yes, this has definitely been an issue for years and many previous versions.
I’m getting something very similar to this, by the sound of it (and always have, on previous versions of Cb Elements - I eventually shelled out extra and upgraded to Pro, partly for the additional features/functionality, and partly because I hoped it might resolve my issue, and it hasn’t). I can be working on a project - and I wouldn’t say mine were particularly large - maybe 10-15 tracks, a mixture of audio and VSTs, with no more than a handful of inserts, Cubase is perfectly happy, save the project, shut down the PC, go to bed, get up the next morning, fire up the PC, open Cubase, and it’ll stop responding while it loads the MixConsole. It’ll do this repeatedly, with me having to use the Task Manager to shut it down, sometimes I’ll go through multiple hard reboots of the PC, and other times just keep restarting Cubase. And then, for no apparent reason, it’ll open the project as if there was never any problem. Or it’ll open a different one that it wouldn’t open yesterday. It’s as if there’s goblins in there, who see me wanting to work on a project, and say “Shall we let him do this today? Nah, let’s mess him around for the best part of a weekend…”
Hi SwissTonyy10, that must a frustrating issue! Though, with respect, it’s not what I’m describing on this thread — I would recommend starting a new thread with your specific issue and you’ll be able to get more support from others who are experiencing what you’re going through. The issue I described is only and always when Cubase is already up and running and you load consecutive large projects up back-to-back.
I did some tests with Memory Cleaner on Mac, which is an app that monitors your memory usage and enables you to clean unused portions of it out.
Conclusion: This seems to be a Cubase problem. When I close a session, a lot of RAM is still kept in memory – some of it gets dumped but not even close to all of it. If you load up another session then it just piles up on the RAM and crashes when it reaches the ceiling (in my case 32gb). However, if you close a session and then clean the RAM up you see very clearly that Cubase goes down to a negligible amount of RAM usage, and then you can load up another large session without a problem. Everyone can try my test to see for yourself.
By way of comparison: When I do the same test in Pro Tools and Studio One on the same computer and with equally large sessions, I can see very clearly that the RAM gets dumped as it should when loading up a new session, which is why there are never crashes for this reason.
The one thing I can’t explain is why umfufu’s friend does not experience this issue. It’s possible that his sessions don’t push the RAM up to 32 gigs, but I don’t know. But this all would explain why when umfufu upgraded to 64gb, the problem does not happen. Again: For me and all the other composers I know on both Windows and Mac, this is an issue and has been for years.
Steinberg: This years-long issue appears to be Cubase not properly dumping all of the RAM in between sessions. What the cause of that is I don’t know, but it needs to be investigated and fixed. It’s a very significant problem.
That is interesting about Memory Cleaner!
To be fair I do still get some crashes in-between sessions, but that could be due to loading up plug-ins, etc, and less about the RAM now. Now that I have 64 gigs it crashes in-between sessions way less (I always worry that I’m going to jinx myself saying such things but fingers crossed!). With 16 gigs it was every time basically.
They definitely need to fix this but I think you’re right, as it’s been around for years I doubt it’s an easy/quick fix.
Some acknowledged of the problem would be really great though.
Totally, yes. It’s a crappy workaround for expensive “pro” software, but either I switch to another DAW or use Memory Cleaner in between the big sessions - it takes about 20 to 30 seconds to fully clear the RAM out, which sucks, but it’s better than the slow and bumbling option of closing and re-opening Cubase every damn time.
I’ve had lots and lots of these crashes as well and I have the same thought about ram not being released
Did you read this?
Interesting, though there’s no firm conclusion from it. Someone on that thread said that not dumping RAM was a Mac issue, yet I have never - not once - had this problem with Pro Tools or Reaper, both loading sessions back-to-back that are just as large as my Cubase sessions, and all using the same plugins (including Kontakt).
There’s something wrong going on here…it could be Kontakt, and if it is then Steinberg and NI need to sort it out. I’ll try loading up large sessions back-to-back and take out Kontakt, will report back after I do that.
Tested this today, and the culprit is not Kontakt, at least on my system. This issue has clearly been around for many years now, and again it does not happen at all on Pro Tools and Reaper on my same system using all of the same plugins.
Timo, if you wanted to point us to that thread to start sending crash reports to the Steinberg posting in that thread then will do, though currently the dialog window crashes when I click “Report” on OSX, so not sure what to do there. I’ll send when I can though. Expect some incoming.
Yes, I will happily do the same.
I stand corrected: Even if I dump all unused system and app RAM in between them, I still sometimes get crashes when loading consecutive large projects. I’m going to send the crash reports to the person on that thread (even though the thread is a few years old), and maybe some other mods here.
Still an issue. I now have 64 gigs of RAM, so clearly it’s something other than RAM since that’s a gigantic amount.