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  4. Weird Buffer Behaviour - What am I not getting?

  • Weird Buffer Behaviour - What am I not getting?

    P
    P

    I'm just about at the end of my tether with VEPro now. I've spent months trying to investigate why I get audio dropouts, without any success.

    I'm running 3 PCs, each of which is absolutely rock solid by itself. They look like this:-

    DAW: i7 12 cores, 64GB RAM, 4 SSD drives, Echo Layla, Win7 x64

    Slave 1: i5 8cores, 24GB RAM, SSD Vienna drive, Win7 x64

    Slave 2: i7 8 cores, 16GB RAM, SSD Vienna drive

    Some of the time they behave absolutely fine, but then they go through periods where I get audio dropouts whilst playing across the network. I did think it was a network issue, but I no longer know. I've sat and watched the resource monitors on each machine for hours, whilst playing just a single VIPro, and there is a dip in network use each time a dropout occurs (from 7MB/s to 4MB/s), but I can't tell whether something is killing the network, and thus preventing VEPro streaming MIDI and audio, or whether VEPro is simply ceasing to function, and thus network use is dipping.

    Last week I turned off some background services (Adobe updater, WIndows Updater, WindowsMediaStreamingService) and upped my VEPro buffers from 2 to 3, and had several sessions without a single glitch, but today they're back.

    I noticed a couple of odd things, which I'm hoping someone will have seen before, and have a solution.

    • I have latency set to 128 samples, and 3 VEPro buffers. On the GUI for the VEPro plugin, for some time, it suddenly said 3 buffers - 1152 samples - latency 38 msecs, which is actually 9 times my soundcard buffer rather than 3. When I tried scrolling down to zero buffers it still only went down to an added latency of 512 samples. I don't really have any way to tell whether it's actually adding the number of samples shown, or whether it's just a mistake on the GUI, but even adding 3 buffers didn't solve the audio dropouts (and I'm still only playing one instrument, on slave 1 - not a large mix or anything). After a while it suddenly went back to behaving correctly, showing 0 samples when 0 buffers were added. More to the point, when it did go back to displaying properly I could play with 0 buffers, and not a single glitch.
    • I thought I'd try the old fashioned presets for VI, as opposed to VIPro - as a new user I'd never really seen them. I loaded the 3 bassoon preset 1, and started playing. I noticed it seems to decided, in real time, whether to use the sustain samples or legato. Every time it switched between the two there was a very loud pop. Looking at the resource monitor on my DAW it was clear that these pops were happening because the network was being absolutely killed - dropping immediately from 7MB/s to 1MB/s.

    Any ideas?
  • A
    VSL Team
    A

    Hi Pingu,

    Which network device are you using? An internal or a PCIe network device?

    Did you try to turn off "Interrupt Moderation" on your network devices?

    Regards

    Bernd
  • civilization 3C
    civilization 3C

    could be about dynamic IP, rather than fixed addresses.
  • P
    P
    last edited
    last edited

    @Air said:

    Which network device are you using? An internal or a PCIe network device?

    Did you try to turn off "Interrupt Moderation" on your network devices?

    Thanks Bernd,

    I'm using the internal gigabit connectors on all 3 machines. I'm guessing the next port of call is to look into whether they're at fault - it's just that the weird mistakes in the buffer display have persuaded me that VEPro itself is doing something odd, rather than my system. I have tried turning off interrupt moderation, flow control, large offloads, etc, all of which had no effect - in fact it's possible it made it worse. And I am using static IP addresses.