How do you work on a CPU intensive project?

Hey guys,

For the first time I’m working on a project where the cpu burden is too high and I can barely play back the song.
I did try a few things in the VSTs themselves but it’s not enough.
I rendered in place many of the channels, but to my understanding muting the track shouldn’t help much with decreasing the burden.

As far as I know the options are:

  1. Freezing tracks
  2. Disabling tracks
  3. I read on this forum:
    “Vst3 plugins can turn off processing when no audio is feeding them.
    There is a preference for that :
    Preferences/VST/Plug-ins/Suspend VST 3 plug-in processing when no audio signal are received”
    I don’t know if it’s recommended, can it cause latency issues when playing back?

I would just like to ask how do you deal with heavy projects (mostly on the CPU, RAM is not so much of a problem)
Freezing tracks is very time consuming, and disabling tracks cause some bugs for example the side chain compression information is being deleted…

Thanks a lot in advance