buffers dropping...and praise for Bob & SAC

[Trackzilla]

for some as yet unknown reason I suddenly have buffers dropping at an alarming rate...like 3300-ish across a 5 hour show...damn it it WAS stable lol. Obviously I have a bit of work to do before tomorrows' show.

However, credit where it's due...it was imperceptable in my audio...the show ran fine, in fact drew big kudos from both the talent and the venue. Thank you again Bob for a product that not only runs well when it's supposed to, but recovers extremely well from the sort of real world junk that we should all expect to encounter at some point.

While I'm on the topics of 'Bob' and 'awesome'...anyone else out there as addicted to the amazing power of the left-right click? I'm not quite to the point that I want my lawnmower to set default deck height that way, but I'm getting close. I AM already annoyed that it's not software universal, I find myself trying to left-right click on everything that's fader shaped & puzzled as to why the designer didn't think to make it do something, like snap to default for example...

Bob, you absolutely rock.

[Bob L]

Sorry to hear about the suddent dropped buffers... but glad to hear that the program self-corrected and held its latency.

Perhaps you did not have the Realtime priority option ON and something in the background got on top of the engine threads.

Bob L

[Trackzilla]

true, 'force real time priority' option was not on, for some unknown reason that crashes this box. So yes, I believe that some thread tromping from another process is the most likely scenario, but on a quick glance I saw nothing other than winlogon.exe and csrss.exe showing as other than normal priority...

one of the 3 interfaces I had with me was refusing to pass audio in at all. But it was the lone still functional SMAudio unit in my rack (with 3 failed brothers in my garage) and I had enough inputs without it, I relegated that to the 'later' category and gave it no further thought at the time. I will have some testing/exploration time before today's show, so maybe I'll find a clue.

[Bob L]

Any device that is active in the audio device setup list will be part of the engine loop whether you use it or not... this device could have been causing driver glitches if it was not working correctly.

You should set your preferences with only active devices that are working correctlt... so if you are only using 16 ins... only assign 8 stereo device ins in the setup... this will also save cpu load.

Bob L

[Trackzilla]

Heh...good point. That SMAudio POS was still lightpiped into the MOTU 2408 & assigned, though not in use since it was...recalcitrant....I hadn't assigned it to any channels, but I did leave it's inputs allocated in the driver assignment.
Makes perfect sense that the sudden loss of stability could be related to it's apparent demise. I survived the 2nd night without incident by increasing buffering to where it stabilized (1x256)...and received rave reviews from talent & venue for the show.
Now I have a solid week to beat it up in a controlled environment & exorcise its' demons. Holidays are a mixed blessing that way :/

Also it allowed me to 'force realtime priority' without issue after updating the Motherboard drivers to the shiny new ones ASUS released, still one unknown device listed in device mangler though.

[Bob L]

With the SAC engine... every device listed in the sudio device setup is active at all times... unlike SS... because with SAC, you may assign input sources and output destinations on the fly... and in order to keep sync... that means all devices must be started at the same time... in SAC... the devices are inputting and outputting blank buffers and are always active in the loop.

This means... if any of the devices does not function properly or is not connected to a proper converter, it may not return complete buffers within the looptime and therefore cause the engine to wait, since the engine must wait for all active devices to return a complete buffer before moving on to process the next.

Bob L

[Trackzilla]

I just found a bad solder connection. Word clock in BNC connector on the 2nd MOTU2408 in the chain....looks like a reasonable guess as to why I had such a sudden & dramatic change in the number of dropped buffers eh? :rolleyes:

[Bob L]

Good detective work... are the buffers holding steady now... after the fix?

Bob L

[Trackzilla]

much better, yeah
They're consistent now at least...
when I bring it online it instantly drops a couple of buffers, and after that it seem stable with the same mix file that was causing so much grief that night loaded-although I'm only feeding 3 channels of real audio actually into the preamps atm but they are all active as they were that night...dunno if this is a functional test or not this way?
Just finished resoldering the offending word clock connector, I'll report back when I get it reinstalled & online, it wasn't a part of the assigned or active connections that night, but it WAS part of my BNC wordclock cable chain when the problem erupted.

[Trackzilla]

reinstalled the freshly fixed MOTU2408...set all 48 inputs & all 48 outputs as active, then opened a mix template that calls all 48 ins (although only 12 outs) & ran some audio into ch 1 & 2....had to bump the buffering up to 128x2 to make it completely stable with that many ins on a MOTU, bleh...but then it didn't drop anything in the 30 min or so I mucked with it regardless of what I accessed or adjusted. I'd love to get the latency lower if anyone has any great ideas, but at least it's stable again.
Oh, I dropped 64bitXPPro on a separate partition on this box to see if the MOTU 64 bit driver is any more stable & generally explore the benefits (if any) of this highly touted 64 bit world. So now I can A/B the two configs at will. It still requires a higher latency than I'd like, but it does drop buffers more slowly if the buffers are set too low than it does in 32bit XP. So it seems slightly more solid. If I'm limiting myself to 16 chan-4 mixes & internal processing only it almost looks stable in 'the lab' at 1x32 buffering...but most of my shows demand more than that.

[Bob L]

Are you setting SAC to RealTime Priority... or does that crash the system?

You may also have to turn off things like wireless netwrok if you are not using it... what else is running in the background?

What else is active on the taskbar?

What video card... nVidia by chance? You may have to try a PCI Latency adjust utility to lessen the video card and other PCI timings to be under the audio card.

Is the MOTU a firewire device... if so... have you applied the Microsoft Firewire fix to get the firewire performance back up to full speed rather than the crippled SP2 speed of 100 mbs?

Bob L

[Warren]

reinstalled the freshly fixed MOTU2408...set all 48 inputs & all 48 outputs as active, then opened a mix template that calls all 48 ins (although only 12 outs) & ran some audio into ch 1 & 2....had to bump the buffering up to 128x2 to make it completely stable with that many ins on a MOTU, bleh...but then it didn't drop anything in the 30 min or so I mucked with it regardless of what I accessed or adjusted. I'd love to get the latency lower if anyone has any great ideas, but at least it's stable again.
Oh, I dropped 64bitXPPro on a separate partition on this box to see if the MOTU 64 bit driver is any more stable & generally explore the benefits (if any) of this highly touted 64 bit world. So now I can A/B the two configs at will. It still requires a higher latency than I'd like, but it does drop buffers more slowly if the buffers are set too low than it does in 32bit XP. So it seems slightly more solid. If I'm limiting myself to 16 chan-4 mixes & internal processing only it almost looks stable in 'the lab' at 1x32 buffering...but most of my shows demand more than that.

Somethings that greatly helped my system where setting the PCI Latency on the audio cars so they can hog the PCI BUSS when ever they need to and not be stepped on by other devices on the buss, set audio cards to something like 255 all others much lower. Here is a link to the tool:

http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/Other-DRIVERS-TOOLS/Others/PCI-Latency-Tool-31-build-2.shtml

Also disable any services other than those needed to run XP and the network.

Use a static IP so you can disable DHCP services and DNS services.

Hope it helps
Warren

[Trackzilla]

heh, I suppose some system specifics might be helpful to those inclined to be helpful lol

e8500 CPU
ASUS P5N-EM HDMI Motherboard (with onboard NVidia everything)
4GB DDR2-800 Ram
MOTU 424 PCI card
WD 250GB SATA HD with 4 partitions (1 XP Pro, 1 XP 64-Bit Pro, two discrete storage partitions)
Slim DVD/CD Burner
USB EVGA UV Plus+16 Video adapter for secondary monitor
MOTU 2408, 2408 MKll, and (2x) 24i

the 24i's let me use my existing SMAudio preamps on which the ADAT output card has fried ;)
the 2408's get behringer ada8000's and the pre's from my Yamaha DM1000.

No wireless, no firewire, looking into the PCI latency bit with the tool suggested now. Only things showing in the taskbar are the MS nags for no AV installed, and to activate 'cuz I haven't yet, realtek HD audio mangler for the onboard audio card, NVidia display settings icon, and the similar icon for the USB display unit.

Only 29 processes running without SAC loaded

[Warren]

heh, I suppose some system specifics might be helpful to those inclined to be helpful lol

e8500 CPU
ASUS P5N-EM HDMI Motherboard (with onboard NVidia everything)
4GB DDR2-800 Ram
MOTU 424 PCI card
WD 250GB SATA HD with 4 partitions (1 XP Pro, 1 XP 64-Bit Pro, two discrete storage partitions)
Slim DVD/CD Burner
USB EVGA UV Plus+16 Video adapter for secondary monitor
MOTU 2408, 2408 MKll, and (2x) 24i

the 24i's let me use my existing SMAudio preamps on which the ADAT output card has fried ;)
the 2408's get behringer ada8000's and the pre's from my Yamaha DM1000.

No wireless, no firewire, looking into the PCI latency bit with the tool suggested now. Only things showing in the taskbar are the MS nags for no AV installed, and to activate 'cuz I haven't yet, realtek HD audio mangler for the onboard audio card, NVidia display settings icon, and the similar icon for the USB display unit.

Only 29 processes running without SAC loaded

Wow 29 seems a lot mine reports 12 without SAC or SAW running but mine are striped down dedicated only for a DAW or SAC.

[Trackzilla]

well, the PCI latency tool shows 11 devices, only one of which has an adjustable timer, the only outboard thing is the MOTU card, so I increased it to 248 (multiple of 8 closest to the 255 you recommended)
All the other devices are the imbedded devices on the motherboard.
no real change, although I do note that the box seems to drop buffers when redraws occour...at 48 ch & 8 mixes active, 2x64 buffering, and audio fed into 2 channels to get the engine doing something, it drops 2 buffers when I bring it online, and then is stable unless I move/resize a plug-in window (buffers dropping while moving, and stable when it's stationary) or a single buffer dropping when I f-key a view change or switch to a different console. If I leave all of the windows & views stationary, it runs fine, even if I twiddle knobs & faders at random in any window or plug.

[DominicPerry]

Definitely Activate Windows, you don't need that check going on in the background. And definitely shut security centre down - just close the service down and disable it.
I would also use msconfig (started from the run line) to stop the realtek control panel starting up - it's called RTHDCPL - you'll find it in the startup tab, unckeck it and restart the box. When you do, you'll get a one-off message where you should check the "don't run msconfig or show this dialog at startup".
If you want to post a jpg of your running processes or send me a pm with a list, I can tell you what else you can safely shut down.

Dominic

[Bob L]

The USB video could be a problem... usb interupts the cpu and trying to do video on usb would be hitting the cpu everytime anything is updated onscreen... not sure I would go that way.

For a test... try loosing the second monitor and unplug that usb video... and if that ends up being the culprit... you might consider disabling the nVidia onboard and buying an ATI or Matrox dual monitor card to handle all the video.

Bob L

[Trackzilla]

since it is a 1U chassis, the onboard video is sorta critical, and the USB is the only way I have come up with to have a 2nd monitor. It does have DVI or HDMI out as well as VGA for the onboard video, I haven't found an adapter that fits to see if I can squeeze 2 monitors out of the onboard yet...if the motherboard people were as helpful as people here, I'd know without the adapter lol

I shut down security center, activated windows, and killed the realtek...got those nags off at least.

processes below, & thanks for being willing to take a look, I do intend this computer strictly for SAC & later SAW, so any unnecessaries can die if someone can point em out ;)
wmiprvse.exe
wmiprvse.exe
explorer.exe
ctfmon.exe
svchost.exe
nvsvc64.exe
LtyCfgSvc.exe
svchost.exe
alg.exe
rundll.exe
spoolsv.exe
lsass.exe
services.exe
svchost.exe
winlogon.exe
reader_sl.exe*32
csrss.exe
DisplayLinkUI.exe
smss.exe
svchost.exe
DisplayLinkService.exe
svchost.exe
DisplayLinkManager.exe
svchost.exe
system
system idle process

[Warren]

since it is a 1U chassis, the onboard video is sorta critical, and the USB is the only way I have come up with to have a 2nd monitor. It does have DVI or HDMI out as well as VGA for the onboard video, I haven't found an adapter that fits to see if I can squeeze 2 monitors out of the onboard yet...if the motherboard people were as helpful as people here, I'd know without the adapter lol

I shut down security center, activated windows, and killed the realtek...got those nags off at least.

processes below, & thanks for being willing to take a look, I do intend this computer strictly for SAC & later SAW, so any unnecessaries can die if someone can point em out ;)
wmiprvse.exe
wmiprvse.exe
explorer.exe
ctfmon.exe
svchost.exe
nvsvc64.exe
LtyCfgSvc.exe
svchost.exe
alg.exe
rundll.exe
spoolsv.exe
lsass.exe
services.exe
svchost.exe
winlogon.exe
reader_sl.exe*32
csrss.exe
DisplayLinkUI.exe
smss.exe
svchost.exe
DisplayLinkService.exe
svchost.exe
DisplayLinkManager.exe
svchost.exe
system
system idle process

Just to add to what Bob is stating, I also kill USB ports altogether (VIA BIOS) I found that my wireless mouse and keyboard were hogging the PCI BUS causing output buffer dropouts.

[Angie]

Thanks to Dominic, I got rid of the realtek control panel which wasn't loading right for me in the first place. I got rid of Skytel.exe also.

Now I see I've got MMERefresh.exe running which appears to be a midi port refresh for a digi002R. I don't have this device. Anyone know if it also is used by the MBox2 Pro?


This is a great thread! Keep it coming.

[Warren]

well, the PCI latency tool shows 11 devices, only one of which has an adjustable timer, the only outboard thing is the MOTU card, so I increased it to 248 (multiple of 8 closest to the 255 you recommended)
All the other devices are the imbedded devices on the motherboard.
no real change, although I do note that the box seems to drop buffers when redraws occour...at 48 ch & 8 mixes active, 2x64 buffering, and audio fed into 2 channels to get the engine doing something, it drops 2 buffers when I bring it online, and then is stable unless I move/resize a plug-in window (buffers dropping while moving, and stable when it's stationary) or a single buffer dropping when I f-key a view change or switch to a different console. If I leave all of the windows & views stationary, it runs fine, even if I twiddle knobs & faders at random in any window or plug.

That input causing the drop, could be video refresh during the twiddle or USB mouse if you have one.

"OK as you have noticed my reading is sketchy as I have aged, but I think me think I know what it is you say" :P)

[DominicPerry]

I missed the video via USB thing. That will be a disaster, I'm afraid.

As for the other processes.
wmiprvse.exe FINE
wmiprvse.exe FINE
explorer.exe FINE
ctfmon.exe FINE
svchost.exe FINE
nvsvc64.exe NVIDIA VIDEO CONTROL PANEL - some reports of memory leaks, see if everything works ok if you shut it down, if so, lose it.
LtyCfgSvc.exe FINE
svchost.exe FINE
alg.exe FINE
rundll.exe FINE
spoolsv.exe FINE
lsass.exe FINE
services.exe FINE
svchost.exe FINE
winlogon.exe FINE
reader_sl.exe*32 ACROBAT SPEED LAUNCHER. Kill it.
csrss.exe FINE
DisplayLinkUI.exe I think this is part of your USB display device so you will have to leave it if you are using the USB display.
smss.exe FINE
svchost.exe FINE
DisplayLinkService.exe USB display, as above
svchost.exe FINE
DisplayLinkManager.exe USB display, as above
svchost.exe FINE
system FINE
system idle process FINE

So just the two to remove and the USB display to 'get around' somehow.

Dominic

[DominicPerry]

Thanks to Dominic, I got rid of the realtek control panel which wasn't loading right for me in the first place. I got rid of Skytel.exe also.

Now I see I've got MMERefresh.exe running which appears to be a midi port refresh for a digi002R. I don't have this device. Anyone know if it also is used by the MBox2 Pro?


This is a great thread! Keep it coming.

Just kill MMERefresh and see if everything you have still works ok. If you need it, you can reactivate it. Things like Adobe will keep reinstalling the drivers/startup items even if you disable them, so you won't do any harm to deactivate these things if you then discover down the line that you need to re-install later. Anything which runs as a service or background process is likely to be fundamental - if you shut the process down, it quickly becomes apparent that the interface/whatever isn't working. Then you can just re-enable it.

The only odd one I had trouble with was the Echo Audiofire needs the "Windows Audio" service to be running or the midi ports don't work. That was odd. As I rarely use midi, I wondered if the hardware had broken because it was so long since I shut down the service. The RME devices don't need that to support midi. Odd.

Dominic

[Angie]

Thanks Dominic,
I rarely use Midi as well. So, I hope I remember that I've disabled this when someday I happen to need the midi ports.

[DominicPerry]

Thanks Dominic,
I rarely use Midi as well. So, I hope I remember that I've disabled this when someday I happen to need the midi ports.

Angie, I'm pretty sure it's just for the 002, not the MBox.

Dominic

[Angie]

Angie, I'm pretty sure it's just for the 002, not the MBox.

Dominic

I'm pretty sure you are right.

[Trackzilla]

Thanks Dominic for the second opinion, those were the same I had about the processes as well, a few extra things due to 64 and 32 bit versions of some processes & services, but otherwise nothin much else I could lose. No time to experiment further before this next round of shows, but at least the system is stable now albeit with a bit more latency than I'd like.

I'll report back on what the real world says about the tweaks so far ;)

[Trackzilla]

The shows ran fine, A Christian Rock band with two choirs and a small orchestra, 1 day of tech & one 2.5 hr show. We ran 40 mono ch and 3 stereo pairs, across 8 mixes with no glitches, no hangs, and a whopping 4 dropped buffers. The latency I had to run to achieve stability & get through the show (2x256) was only noticed by two performers, neither of who was disturbed by it once I explained what they were hearing...But I hated having to explain any deficiency, so...

Now back in the shop, I've rounded up a DVI-D monitor so I could lose the USB video adapter & test two monitors off of the MB's internal video...Viola! stability is DRAMATICALLY improved. I loaded the same mix file I had used at the show, then shifted all of the inputs to a couple of channels that I was running audio into with the engine live to hopefully simulate what I was asking the engine to do before...kinda.

With USB second monitor- we were stable at 2x256 & 52% CPU
With onboard dual video- we are completely stable & responsive at 2x64 with 95% CPU.

Yay! (note to all watching this thread...USB video very bad...mmmkay?)

Stress test time:
I enabled freakin' everything. 72 ch of IN & 26 ch of out devices. Replicated input 1 across 72 ch FOH, & 11 stereo mixes & fed it some audio. Set mix 1 as master, just like I oughta, leaving 10 on my virtual stage. Then replicated the same settings across every FOH & Mon1 channel: gate (set to tigger some) comp (squish a bit) low cut & every band of eq adjusted...then tossed in an instance of SIR to aux1 on FOH fed from every thing...at 1x128 it's stable & 95% CPU. At 12 mixes (11 onstage) it finally starts getting sluggish and occasionally dropping a buffer. This'll likely do for a WHILE lol.

Next to create a quieter cooling system for this 1U bugger.

I'll post one more follow-up after it's next real-world use, but with the holidays that may be a couple of weeks...