Hello,
Sorry to hear about those troubles.
Talked to my colleague Marnix, and unfortunately there are no absolute truths when it comes to thread distribution, it also seems like every Kontakt producer uses the Kontakt engine in a different way.
One important fact is that you shouldn´t mix PLAY and Kontakt in one VI instance.
If you like to have bigger ViFrames, you should activate the Kontakt Multiprocessor Support and set VE PRO to around 2 threads per instances.
With multiple smaller ViFrames it´s better to let VE PRO handle multi-processing and switch it off in Kontakt.
Depends a lot on the scripting and file-handling in Kontakt...
We found that if you stick to the Kontakt Factory Sounds, you won´t run into any CPU troubles....
If you are using VE PRO locally, you should leave at least 2 Threads for the DAW.
Regarding Buffersizes: Again, it depends a lot on your project and workflow.
The best idea is to set the Buffer setting in the VE PRO Server Interface Plug-in to 4x for all instances that only play back, and only lower the buffer size there when you are recording on a specific VE PRO instance.
Hope that helps!
If you can send us any crash-dumps, that will also help (with a quick reference to this thread): support@vsl.co.at
You can also create a process dump when software hangs, please see the following image on how to create a minidump with process explorer:
http://cloud.addictivetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/create-dump-1.png
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx
Best,
Paul