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Why does my CPU meter spike in DP even when the actual CPU usage in Activity Monitor is almost nothing?

If I'm in Logic Pro then I can run a lot more plugins per channel. I hear that people with Reaper, Studio One, or Cubase can have 3-4 plugins per channel and record like 16 at a time or more with a 32 or 64 sample buffer. Meanwhile in DP with a 128-sample buffer I can only have a handful of plugins before CPU starts spiking in Live Performance Mode. And the CPU is barely being used on an M1 Max.

I tried contacting DP support and sent them a sample project that I was having the issues with, and they said it sounded like it shouldn't be performing that way, but then I never heard back from them. I keep hoping to see a new update to DP that addresses the issue of Performance Cores not being used at all, but so far I haven't seen any indication that they've updated their code to resolve this.

Does anyone know of any workarounds? I've tried everything I could think of, including installing and running DP on the previous version of macOS, but no dice. Using the most efficient plugins I can find helps, for sure, but I really feel like the DAW is just not taking best advantage of the CPU, or there is some kind of bottleneck there, and I've seen other threads here that also reported similar issues (example: viewtopic.php?t=72307).

Thanks for any tips

Some of the MOTUMW plug-ins are culprits. No big deal unless you can hear the artifacts and distortion and the MW Limiter is a serious offender and eliminating it from my workflow made a difference. I've done a couple of one-on-one calls demonstrating the distortion and artifacts. That was two years and a half years ago.

I consider the use of cores the way people want to see them in the Activity Monitor a non-issue.

You didn't say if you can actually hear anything when this happens. There was a long thread on the matter years ago.. Most could see the meter but didn't hear anything and the conclusion appeared to be to just ignore it. For purposes of analysis, having the window that shows CPU load for plugins might be useful. Using that I dumped bx_meter when it showed up to a third of the load in a typical project came from that one plugin with one instance.

Spiking CPU meters in DP in my experience are almost always plugin specific. At one point it was Kontakt here that spiked the CPU. The Effect Performance Window will let you know which plugin is badly coded or causing issues with DP.

In terms of CPU, Reaper cubase and DP are very CPU friendly as long as the plugin isn't causing issues. They all use all cores on modern Arm Macs, whereas Logic does not. The truth is Logic and Cubase on Mac have the specific advantage of being the primary testing grounds for AU and VST for nearly all developers, so it's unfortunately more likely that DP has an issue than Logic, but that doesn't mean Logic doesn't have issues with plugins, and currently it can't use Efficiency cores on Apple Silicon.

Why running in in Live Performance Mode?