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[mozart999uk]

Hi. I'm getting occasional asio spikes in Cubase and trying to diagnose the problem.

I've been trying to run latencymon whilst cubase is running to see if I can catch one but running latencymon causes Cubase to spike and drop out like crazy. Soon as I stop the monitoring process, cubase returns to normal.

Running DPC latency checker is no problem at all.

Any ideas?

Cubase 9.0.20, Windows 7 x64.

RME 9632

[Pete Kaine]

Yeah, I'd expect this, we'd normally advise against running latency mon alongside your sequencer for this reason. You test the drivers on the system without it running to rule out the drivers, and then if it then happens with Cubase running then you start to examine why it's doing it in the sequencer.

Maybe try running a test project in Reaper to see if it happens in both. If not you can confirm it's a Cubase specific setting or issue.

Possibly related, what CPU are you running in the system?

Maybe try flicking ASIOGuard on/off (depending on current setting) and test too.

[mozart999uk]

Thanks Pete. That's really useful stuff,

Latency mon seems to be running fine without Cubase running. All good figures.

The spikes are a pain as they only happen every now and then.

I think it's something to do with the move from Cubase 8.5 to 9 and also connected with UHE diva. Been chatting to UHE about it too.

The machine is a 3xs audio system, i7 3930 oc'd at 4.2. It's been rock solid since I've bought it 4 years ago. First time anything like this has happened ....

[Pete Kaine]

Yeah, if latency mon is looking fine and it started after an update, I'd be looking to dig further into the software side of things. Do you still have the 8.5 build installed? If so, does it do it on there too?

The reason I was asking about cores is that there is a known multi-core issue that has workarounds, but in this instance, you don't have enough cores in the CPU for that to be a concern.

[mozart999uk]

Thanks for all your advice. I'll try the VST3 suspend option although the plugin in question isn't VST3, I think there are some in the project ....

I haven't had a chance to test it thoroughly in Cubase 8.5 as sometimes it's half an hour before there's a spike.

I'll try and do a longer test.

I'll try asio guard too.

[CS70]

Hi. I'm getting occasional asio spikes in Cubase and trying to diagnose the problem.

Identifying the reason for these spikes is not easy, but it helps being structured and systematic: it could be an hardware issue, a system issue (drivers or other OS behavior), a Cubase issue or a plugin issue. You want to eliminate these one by one.

In random order:

- enter the BIOS and run a full RAM diagnostic check, just in case

- disable any hardware component you don't need, so that your system is as barebone as possible: no network card, no bluetooth radio, nothing else than the minimal set of hardware (and hence drivers) to use the system to produce audio. Certain component's drivers are badly coded and clog the CPU with interrupts, creating real-time processing issues.

- similarly, remove any software component you don't strictly need. Stuff like "call home" updaters can wake up at the wrong moment, triggering system-wide page swapping, garbage collection and other stuff that can momentarily reduce the realtime performance of your system. This is a little harder as there's no unified way to control what gets run, but you can use stuff like Technet's Process Explorer to see what is running and especially what the servicehost processes do (they're quite opaque to the standard tools like taskmanager). All unnecessary services should be disabled, and you can see if anything is started at system start by looking in the registry.

- check if the OS is reporting some issue, using the Event Viewer. Windows has become rather good in reporting what's happening, if you know where to look.

- look at the task scheduler to see if there's any task which is scheduled to run (or did run) when you're working.

- change the DAW and verify if the problem occurs with other DAWs or not (Reaper, free/demo editions of ProTools, Mixbus etc).

- obviously, work on a project without using plugins and see if the spikes keep appearing.

- check your disk for faulty sectors and ensure you have plenty of space, and, if it's a rotating drive, that it's not too fragmented

The fact that the system used to work well is promising - but driver updates, system updates, DAW updates or the wrong plugin can create havoc.

[mozart999uk]

Thanks - that's really really helpful.

There's another issue that's cropped up - the bios has started forgetting it's settings so have replaced the battery. We'll see what happens. Not entirely sure the two are related .....

[mozart999uk]

Haven't had much time to deal with this issue as was so busy leading up to Christmas (managed to limp through trying to ignore the dropouts) but having solved my bios issues with a new battery I'm now looking again at solving the dropouts problem.

I ran latency mon for an hour and it came up with this screenshot.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipM ... rqZ8Wcp2Y2


I have the text report if that would be useful for anyone

Main driver culprit seems to be:

storport.sys highest execution of 1.094 (ms)

Any thoughts on this one? Google isn't producing any concrete results.....

Going to look at all the other advice from this thread over the next few days and see if any of those tweaks make a difference.

[Matt Houghton]

The image URL appears to have been truncated, and the link is not working...

[mozart999uk]

Sorry about that....seems to be working this end. Might be a google permissions thing?

Here's the link again

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipM ... rqZ8Wcp2Y2

or perhaps this one

https:*?*?*/mD40eR

[Pete Kaine]

Storport is drive subsystem.

Thing is, windows starts to housekeep the system at the 20min mark, and that includes drive optimizing which can easily cause that to flag. That shouldn't happen whilst your inside of Cubase however, unless your jamming across the room for an hour at a time.

What's the test look like at 15mins? I don't really pay much heed to it past that point.

In general chipset driver update would apply here as best practice, although I doubt it'll have much of an impact.

[mozart999uk]

Thanks for your reply.

Here's a shot after 15 minutes

https:*?*?*/icLhtm


I've checked regarding power management. Everything in the power profile is set to 100%. I've turned off all C states in the bios and CPUZ is reporting a constant CPU speed with no throttling take place.....

I've found a bios update, chipset update and LAn update for the MOBO

[job]

Might be worth seeing if Process Explorer can shed some light https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysint ... s-explorer

Run it, right click on the columns at the top and select columns, go to the Process Memory tab and check the boxes for page faults and page fault delta. Click ok. Sort by PF Delta so you know what the highest one is. This will hopefully narrow down your search.

As a troubleshooting step, pull your ethernet lead and/or disable wifi. You never know.

Page faults can be a pain :thumbdown:

[CS70]

Thanks for your reply.

Here's a shot after 15 minutes

https:*?*?*/icLhtm


I've checked regarding power management. Everything in the power profile is set to 100%. I've turned off all C states in the bios and CPUZ is reporting a constant CPU speed with no throttling take place.....

I've found a bios update, chipset update and LAn update for the MOBO

There's a bunch of things you can do, but the challenge of that kind of issues is that it's a bit of detective work so it's very time consuming to do it online, and it may require a modicum of understanding of the software environment.

Have you checked for errors in the Event Viewers? Windows has a lot of built-in diagnostics if you know where to look.

Also, a good starting point is download the Windows Performance Toolkit and run the xperf or WPR and produce an etl or etw file to look at.

[mozart999uk]

Thanks for your reply. Appreciate these are hard ones to diagnose remotely,

I'm trying to work out what changed prior to the problem - I've got to look at emails and see if I can work out dates. I know the date of the tracks where I first noticed the problem .....

Have been looking at event viewer over the last few days. I don't get any critical errors but I do get 4 errors repeatedly - WMI, Side by side,Volmgr and service control manager.

I'll try the windows performance toolkit.

Am also checking all the drives for errors .

Is there anything I can run alongside Cubase so that when a spike happens I might be able to see what the problem is?