I am using Cubase 8 Pro 64bit on Windows 10 Pro 64 bit.
My setup has Intel i7 and 32GB of DDR3 ram.
Kontakt preload instrument size is 60kb.
Yesterday I ran out of memory while working on a project, then made some analysis. Here is my question;
I open;
Windows Taskbar
then a fresh Cubase 8 Pro probject, and see in taskbar window that Cubase 8 Pro takes about 600 MB of mem.
then load Kontakt 5, it reaches from 600 MB to 700 MB, which is normal I guess so far.
than load for example NI Maverick Piano. Cubase memory consumption in taskbar reaches from 700 MB to 1200 MB (which means Maverick takes about 500MB), but in Kontakt window, it says 200MB for Maverick.
So is that normal?
(Note: This is just one example. It is happening for all loadings. There is about 400-500MB of difference between Kontakt info and Taskbar info per instrument.).
The behaviour, you describe could be normal. It depends on the plug-in. It depends, when Kontakt frees-up the memory. If you unloaded (or overwrite) the sound, it doesn’t mean, the memory is free. The memory could be still occupated by the samples, until another samples will use it.
When loading kontakt with a few big libraries (Komplete 10 Ultimate) I can reach up to 18 till 20 GB of memory consumed.
I could add more but not needed in my case. I once tried to load as much as I could but never have reach max memory situation.
My conclusion is that the memory usages will increase the more you call voices and articulations.
My theory is that when a big library is opened only the first part of a sample is pre-loaded, the rest is done with DFD (Direct from disk or something similar), but when you call the samples on a more intense manner more samples material is cached into memory, so leading in some cases to out of memory situation and like mine when only pre-loading a playing a few notes doesn’t lead to memory shortage.