Severe Dropouts - CPU Spike - SOLVED

[bad_dude_69]

I'm hoping there's at least one rocket scientist out there that may have some time and perhaps a great suggestion or two.

Here's the situation.

Two weeks ago, I replaced my primary HD and did a fresh install of the OS / audio software / drivers, etc. The second internal drive remained the same, it houses all of my sessions / data. Now, when opening a session in Sonar, major audio dropouts occur at irregular intervals. Sessions played flawlessly before. These dropouts are not normal little pops & clicks, this is a block of major garbled stutter I'm talking about. A real show-stopper. This stutter coincides with a huge spike in the CPU load (it'll often shoot up to 100% from the low double-digits). This happens with the smallest of sessions -- even only 4 tracks @ 44.1k / 16 bit where the CPU hovers around 10% during play.

Here's the kicker -- to troubleshoot this, I swapped out the new primary HD for the old, it booted fine, I opened up a session, and the SAME PROBLEM occurred. This means it's not about settings or missing plugins, etc.

Here are some quick notes:

- Using a Delta 44 & Delta 66 in tandem
- Newest drivers installed, same settings as before (Sonar & ASIO)
- XP is in barebones configuration, only software is audio software

Things I've tried:

- Checked normal antivirus, defrag, software conflicts, none found
- Swapped cards between PCI slots, not an IRQ issue
- Re-detected drive configuration in BIOS, no effect
- Switched between ASIO and WDM, no effect
- Messed w/ latency settings, increased to absurd levels, NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER (apparently not a PC resource issue)
- Moved a session to the primary drive, played from there, NO EFFECT
- Re-seated ALL PC components and IDE cables, no effect

So yeah, a total mind#*&#. Am I missing something obvious? Any thoughts on this other than "uhh... get a new computer"? I'd consider myself knowledgeable so feel free to throw computer speak my way...

**SOLUTION**

LONG STORY SHORT:

Try disabling your WiFi card.

FULL VERSION:

As the title of the thread says, the CPU spike was caused by the "System" process. Curiously, the spikes were occurring outside of Sonar, when the PC was completely idle. This meant the problem had little to do with the audio cards / setup.

Hours later, I'd narrowed it down to being the wireless card. Even though it had an established connection, it was continuously evaluating the networks within its range. I disabled the WiFi card and everything returned to normal.

I don't know if this is a problem with this particular network adapter (Linksys WUSB300N) or what... newest drivers do nothing to fix the problem. Only works when disabled. At any rate, more information on similar / related symptoms can be found here.

[vvv]

I assume you ran your AV, and Spybot, Adaware, etc., ...

Did you try a stripped boot-up? Definitely try it with your AV off...

Try changing your visual settings to 16 bit?

Check for bad memory?

[RodC]

Make sure the cpu spike is being caused by SONAR and not some other application. If you do a ctrl alt del you should be able to monitor what is going on, sort your process list by CPU and see what is at top.

Have you opened a project in safe mode? (this will load it without any plugs)

Are you syncing the cards with the interal sync option in the drivers? (0nly works with AISO BTW)

Have you deleted the aud.ini file and allowed it to reanalize your sound card?

I would head over to the cake board, sometimes they can be some help.

[TheForgotten]

Try rolling back your drivers for the Deltas.
I've found some of the older drivers to be more stable.

[wrenhunter]

Open your computer and check all your cables & connections, and reseat your memory. You may have knocked something loose when swapping drives.

[Mradyfist]

I guess my best guess would be that something is horribly wrong with your audio drive. Have you tried running chkdsk on it?

[bad_dude_69]

Thanks for your help, everyone. RodC, I'd taken for granted that the spike was being caused by SONAR -- once I looked beyond that I found myself on the right track. Awesome.

My original post has been updated with the solution.

[Mradyfist]

Good to hear you got it figured out. For a fix that doesn't involve disabling your wireless adapter, you could try looking at the device properties to see if there's some switches you could make there.

On a related note, my girlfriend's computer had an issue a while ago where having the wireless PCI card in the slot next to the video card would cause it to freeze, ostensibly because RFI from the wireless card was screwing with the video card. Ever since then, I've hated wireless adapters that weren't built in to the computer.

[kayagum]

Glad you figured it out. Turning off as many "services" as possible is important in fine-tuning your machine.

[RodC]

Thanks for your help, everyone. RodC, I'd taken for granted that the spike was being caused by SONAR -- once I looked beyond that I found myself on the right track. Awesome.

My original post has been updated with the solution.

Been there, amazing what a quick sanity check can do. And it usualy takes someone who aint ready to throw the damn thing out the window to rope me back in!

I had a similar issue with a printer. I had removed a printer from my network. One of my PCs still had it setup as the default printer and now and again someone would send a job to that driver. The damn driver was taking up 50% of my cpu all the time with just 2 print jobs in the cue. Thats a lot of horse power just to look for a printer! Im not mentioning any names (epson) but thats insane.

Glad your up and running!