CPU usages jumps on its own

I’ve seen this happen quite a bit on my set up.

I have a pedalboard that uses under 70 or 80%. No issues with CPU usage.
Randomly I see the CPU meter jump to 100% and I hear the pop.
Sometimes when playing I hear the pop and look at my GUI and see the meter at 100% and go back down.

I’m almost always playing with the GUI open so I don’t know if this would happen if disconnected from my computer. However, when I do recordings, I want to keep it connected so that I have access to all the settings for changes needed.

Is this a known issue?

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I’ve had this happen on one of my patches - more noticeably when connected to the GUI (It’s so slow on my system that I never play with it open) but also occasionally outside of that… I’ve always wondered if it’s the complexity of what I’m putting through it that’s making it work harder at certain points! Maybe I should test that theory in a more scientific way! :slight_smile:

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A few of us noticed this around the time of the 1.6 release: Release 1.6.0

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I zero’d out the XRUN counter and left my Duo running connected to the browser for 2 hours and had 11 XRUNS. Comes out to about one every 10 minutes.

I zero’d it out and pulled the USB cable from my Duo and let it run for two hours. When I plugged it back and pulled up the GUI there were 2 XRUNs counted. So there seems to be a correlation with the use of the GUI but still happening without it.

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I did a test with no Beta plugins and it still did it…

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I’m resurrecting this thread because I noticed something interesting recently. I decided to use @rogeriocouto 's technique of using level meters on all my boards in conjunction with gain plugins at the end of each chain to get a better view on my gain staging. I also had a pair of spectrum analyzers at either end of a pair of low-pass and high-pass filters to clean up the sound coming out of the cab sims/IRs I’m using. Since I started monitoring levels, I’ve noticeably improved the sound of my pedalboards.

But when I started using IRs a several weeks ago, I noticed that I’d get stray xruns every few minutes or so. These are all boards that have < 55% reported CPU usage. It finally got to the point that it started to bug me, so I decided to remove the “extras”. The reported CPU usage of these extras was only a few percent at the most combined, but once I removed them, the xruns disappeared.

I think what was happening (and I could be totally off here) was that while the extras weren’t using much DSP, they were doing a significant amount of processing to present near-realtime output to the web UI. Just enough to starve the system of enough cycles so that it would trigger xruns. Anyway, I hope this is helpful for others who might see occasional xruns in low-CPU pedalboards.

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Did you put these meters in-line (with both i/o connected) or only on the outputs?

The later should be preferred (so having them “parallel” to the plugin chain).

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The low/hi pass filters were in series in the chain with the IR loader, but the spectrum analyzers and level meters can only be placed in parallel since they have no output plugs.

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Hi, @malfunction54
Although I use level meter plugins all the time, as soon as I am satisfied with the gain staging of my pedalboard, I get rid of them exactly because they use a lot of CPU.
As of now I usually just use one level meter to check levels and move it around to check the output of a plugin or plugin set, but actually sometimes I’m interested in the level I’m inserting into certain types of plugins.

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I was just about to add that I’ve only removed the “extras” from the pedalboards that I’ve decide are keepers!