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I'm having a bit of trouble lately due to Cubase locking up more or less at random. Whenever I have Orbitone's Vorb, and some other 3rd party apps (like the Pepperghost demo), loaded up, this happens. A lot. I usually have enough things going so that the meters for CPU usage are all around 80% (Cubase, UAD, Pulsar). When it crashes, CPU time in Cubase reads 100%. Anyone have any ideas on what could be wrong?

i dont have a clue yet, but just to clarify; XTC or not?

Actually I would have to ask if you're using HT on your cpu...I've found that vorb doesn't like my dual machine at all, but when its in my single cpu p3 box it works great.

Single CPU, not using XTC.

Might be an infinite loops in a VST plugin (You know, VST plugins run in the same thread as the host, so, even if the host has a way to handle plugin crashes without bailing out, an infinite loop will hinder the host - in your case Cubase - to do anything anymore, thereby making it a zombie. That was a design decision by Steinberg, and a bad one I might add - if each plugin would use a seperate thread and memory range, and communicate via pipes or shared memory, that wouldn't be possible. But the plugins would need much more memory and processing power.). This usually means some plugin has a bug, maybe Vorb, but it could also be due to the fact that the plugins are also not memory-save. That means, any plugin _could_ write in the memory of another plugin, and might either crash or get wild and zombifies the host... That's also a bug of course, but it hasn't to be in the plugin itself, and it's therefore hard to find for the developers, as it would only occur under certain circumstances...

There's not much you could do about it if you don't know how to debug Windows applications (and I don't know, either) - but if there's only _one_ plugin always involved, it's most likely that one... If that's the case, file a bug report with the plugin developers.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: wsippel on 2005-01-16 21:15 ]</font>

Len, single cpu but athlon or p4? And if p4 is HT on? I'm assuming no but just wanting some clarification because I've mentioned this to Orbitone before.

denormalization bug?

http://phonophunk.phreakin.com/articles ... zation.php

@legros

Interesting ! I have noticed such spikes. Not sure I like the work around very much either. Guess I'll just keep do what I'm doing - keeping cubase use to the minimum and doing much in Scope ...

I remember testing that workaround and it didn't make any difference... the solution for me was to simply ban those plugins from my system. I don't really use other stuff than creamware's anymore

Vorb is a DSP plugin, processed entirely inside SFP - it doesn't even exist for the CPU...

cheers, Tom

fair enough but he's using other stuff as well

Thanks for the article, Legros. A lot of us have noticed these spikes before and wondered WTF. But my problem is with plugins for the Creamware platform. The system crashes are not reproducible - difficult to pin it on anything in particular, but I just seem to notice more instability when using some plugins.

Valis - it's a P4, to be honest, I don't know what HT is, how do I tell if it's on / enabled / present?

Look in your BIOS or bring up TaskManager and see if you have 2 cpu windows going under the 'performance' tab.

Checked that, there's only one CPU under the performance tab.