VIs in V-Rack disabled, still massive load time & RAM usage

[dtobocman]

I've been creating a composing palette for a client in DP 7.21 using a single V-Rack loaded with 16 VIs: (10) Kontakt and (4) Stylus instantiations, as well as Omnisphere, and Trillian. With all but 4 VIs disabled, I'm still experiencing DP long load times (5 minutes) and bumping up to 2GB of real memory assigned to DP in the activity monitor. I'm using Kontakt's memory server feature (in manual mode) and the Spectrasonics memory server too (for Omnisphere and Trillian). I'm not convinced that the memory server features are working as advertised -- DP still seems to be loading these samples into its RAM partition as well. (Maybe I just need to trash the Kontakt4 pref... I'm offsite right now, but I'll try that; any help here as to what to look for?).

More details: the 4 VIs left enabled in the "normal" state comprise 450MB usage in Kontakt and 250MB usage in the Spectrasonics memory server. We're on an 8-core with 10GB RAM, running DP 7.21 in Snow Leopard 10.6.5. Using the Digidesign Core Audio driver and a Pro Tools HD interface for output.

My scheme in practice is to enable each instantiation as needed (there's different Kontakt instantiations of "big drums," "cinematic loops," "small drums," "tuned percussion," "orchestral woodwinds," "orchestral brass," and "orchestral percussion," etc. and Stylus has 32 slots of percussion loops across 4 VIs).... all of these are disabled in the V-Rack and the only VIs left enabled are a "rhythm section" Kontakt as well as a Trillian bass setup and 2 pads on 2 channels of Omnisphere.

With DP's real memory usage over 1.5GB in the "normal" state, we're quickly pushing beyond 2GB into crashland when we try to work. I was the one to convince the client to stay in DP for this project (his first score with the new 8-core) instead of finally switching to Logic, which he says is an inevitability (for his own reasons). Another issue is that running DP seems to make Pro Tools hang on startup (requiring trashing of prefs, restarting the computer, with various levels of success) but that's another thread.

Any help with the DP crashes and load times would be awesome. I really don't get why disabled VIs are eating up RAM at this rate. Maybe I've designed a faulty scheme. Perhaps the thing to do is use this template as a source to load from and set up different projects according to what is needed in terms of VIs (i.e., a project of just the orchestral cues in the film). The inherent problem with that idea is that most of the cues are hybrid genres, not purely orchestral or purely non-orchestral, but it may be necessary to tweak the scheme at this point.

Thanks MOTUNATION.

David

[dtobocman]

PILOT ERROR.

I had duplicated the reverbs into each chunk. The fix was to move the reverbs into the V-Rack and delete them into each chunk. DP's load time is down to a minute and it's RAM footprint is currently 670MB with a couple of Kontakt banks loaded. Kontakt's memory server is functioning perfectly -- I couldn't see it before because 30 ProVerbs were eating up a little RAM there....

Sorry to disturb. Maybe some poor soul will stumble upon this post in the future.

David