Hi CPU use with Kontakt 5 and DP7

[JZilla]

So, many months later, I've made some changes to my way of working, but seem to be getting similar results. I've rebuilt my template with all of the instruments running in VE Pro (latest version, 5.1.12010) on a slave PC, nothing in DP or on my Mac at all. It's a fairly large template, with 3 instances of VE Pro on the slave, 12 Audio Input plugin routing the MIDI into the it, and then the audio coming back in on Aux ins, although I've done most of the consolidating of audio channels on the PC (so instead of bringing in 1st Vlns, 2nd Vlns, etc. as their own audio in, I'm bringing in one Strings aux, one Brass aux, and so on). These instrument busses are then sent to stems busses (input enabled audio tracks), and then out a master bus.

This hasn't made as much of an impact as I would've thought, even at a buffer of 1024 I often have clicks and pops, all accompanied by visible CPU spikes in the Audio Performance window in DP.

The most recent development is that I replaced the CPU on my Mac itself, swapping out a 2.66 GHz 4-core for a 3.0 GHz 8-core. Surely that'd make a big difference, right? Well, not so much. Despite the cores showing around a 25% load on average in the Activity Monitor, I'm getting tons of spikes in DP, even when playing one instrument at a time. The PC is handling the load fine, there's 32 GB of RAM in it (of which I'm using about 80-85%), and the CPU on it doesn't seem to be having any trouble.

So it seems to come back to DP. I'm still running 7.24, as 8 doesn't yet seem to be running all that smoothly (video playback problems and crashing) on my machine, even with the new processor. I'm using a D-Link DGS-1005D Ethernet switch, could that be the issue? It almost seems like DP isn't taking advantage of the multi-core, is there a setting somewhere I'm missing?

Obviously, the computer is old, and the long term solution is to replace it with a new one, which I'll be doing whenever the new Mac Pros arrive. If I can get better performance out of this in the meantime though, I'd be much happier. Not looking for anything gaudy, but having it be usable with a buffer under 1024 would be nice. Any suggestions?