So I did a bunch of PC and OS (Windows 10) optimizations a while ago on my laptop DAW (Cubase Artist 9.5.4). And after my most recent work I decided to check overall performance via task manager.
I’ve just started working on my latest song which only consists of a piano midi track and an instance of Halion SE and “The Grand”.
The CPU is only at 10% but the memory is at 25% which I found kind of startling. My laptop has 16Gb of RAM and Cubase is only using about 1.2Gb but even with all the optimizations I was surprised how many background and windows processes were running consuming the remaining 3+Gb.
In the 1980s the first mainframe computer I programmed (IBM 4381) had 16Meg memory - it ran online applications for thousands of users with perfectly good response times - how times change! Imagine how fast Cubase would be if it and the plugins were coded with the same efficiency in mind!
Back to the subject, it’s a shame you’re on a laptop, coz when I was limited to 16Gig RAM (still can’t believe I’m typing that!) I installed a second cheap 40Gb SSD and filled it with a permanent swap file, so even if windows swapped it didn’t seem to affect Cubase unless the swapping became excessive - it cured the swap related recording dropouts and glitches I was suffering from (other than the usual mad CPU spikes of the day.)