Tobiah wrote:
I'm using Windows 7 on a Quad core Phenom IIX4 910.
It's not the cutting edge system anymore, but it has
8Gig ram, and the install is on an SSD - It's no slouch.
So I was getting wonderful audio performance for a long
time, but something new is happening. About every 30
seconds or so, I get a few seconds of dropouts when playing
even simple piano pieces through a VSTi (Kontakt with Reaper host).
It's like clockwork, although I have not measured the periodicity
other than to take note of it while playing. Everything is really
tight like usual, then burp, spit, stutter really badly for about
5 seconds, then it goes away. It has nothing to do with the
number of voices I'm activating at a given time.
I checked the performance monitoring utilities that windows
has, and I see no spike in network, disk or cpu activity during
this recurring, periodic, faithful spaz that goes on. I
tried turning off my firewall (Avast) and Steam, etc, things
that are lurking in the backround, but I saw no change. Something
is different, and I'm afraid it's a Trojan of some kind, but
I don't pirate things, or install questionable software, so I'm
short of explanations other than maybe the NSA 
.
Anyway, I know it's a long shot. I just thought the
experience might ring a bell with someone. I'm pretty much
looking at a re-install if I can't find the culprit. Before
this happened, I was getting 100-200 voices out of Kontact at
2.9ms latency (Well, that's what Reaper says).
There is a possibility that your performance hit is due to a quirk of SSDs.
If you were using a normal hard drive, I'd recommend defragging it. SSDs
supposedly don't need this, though Win7 supports the TRIM command that can
be used for this function. Before trying something as drastic as a reinstall
which man do nothing to solve this problem, you might want to try defragging
the SSD. Here's a fairly easy to understand article on the topic:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/20475...-your-ssd.html
--
best regards,
Neil