For a long time I have been curious about RAM usage in Cubase…
I have 32gb RAM and an EW Hollywood Orchestra (PLAY) template that fills most of that.
When I load a project, Cubase RAM usage gets up to around 28.4GB (as measured by task manager), and I usually get a little popup in warning me that I’m running out of memory.
However, after around 3 minutes, Cubase RAM usage suddenly drops to around 18gb.
My template is still there, fully-loaded, and running smoothly; so why this sudden drop in usage?
I’m just curious about this. I asked on another forum and someone speculated that it was probably some kind of ‘garbage collection’ process.
Is that what’s going on?
Anyway, I’ve observed this pattern for a long time. But just recently it seems to have stopped happening!
Now the RAM usage when the project is loaded starts at around 28GB, but then remains at that level for the whole session.
There is none of the speculative ‘garbage collection’ process that previously would drop the Cubase RAM usage down to 18GB.
What’s going on?
I have not updated Cubase.
I have not updated PLAY.
The project has not generally expanded in anyway.
Could Windows updates have altered memory management in some way?
So yeah, two questions:
Why did this drop in RAM usage after about 3 minutes happen?
And why is it not happening anymore?
Computer programs often need to use more memory when loading-and-translating data, then when those data are actually all complete and ready in memory.
Thus, it’s quite possible that the extra memory is working memory while “setting everything up” and loading in the data, and then all the working extra buffers go away once it’s done.
Yes, I can totally understand that.
That very reasonably explains the situation as it was.
But, as I said, that is now not happening anymore. The 28GB memory consumption of the initial load now remains for the entire session.
Why are these extra buffers no longer going away once it’s done?
I’ve found out what was causing the failure to discharge buffered RAM!
I had disabled Superfetch (SysMain).
A month ago someone suggested this might be a good thing to do to improve performance on systems with SSDs - so I tried it: I disabled SysMain.
Well, I just re-enabled it and the memory purging behaviour has returned to how it was before. And performance is much better!
I feel like a lot of people in the audio industry are living in the stone age. People on the Samplitude forums are still talking about disabling Swap Files, etc. which has long been known to be a bad idea.
No matter how much we try dissuading people from doing this, the bad guidance persists. The people peddling it tend to be the more active (and reputable, in some cases) posters on many forums. Unfortunately, also they also tend to be the older posters and out of touch with technological reality.
Then there are the people sitting on old OSes like Windows 7 and complaining about performance, when it performs worse than Windows 8.x or 10. Usually for “privacy” reasons.
(Ignoring the fact that Microsoft backported and delivered all the telemetry components to Windows 7 via Windows Update.)
It’s important for people to just avoid messing with their system in this way. Great things hardly come out of it, and as time passes they can “forget what they did,” which makes these issues incredibly difficult to troubleshoot.