Kontakt 5.5 memory leak/SSD performance

I've just upgraded my harddrive to a samsung 850 evo 2tb, and have been testing performance in Kontakt to try and dial in settings.

Obviously the first thing I did was lower the preload buffer to minimum, and the first thing I noticed is that the ram footprint in task manager for an instrument is far higher than Kontakt reports. I spotted this discussion on a very recent post here and I understand that an instrument uses ram for more than just the samples, e.g. groups/effects etc, but the difference still seems surprising.

For example I load an instrument, and the ram usage from kontakt jumps by about 90mb, even though it says the samples are only taking up 28. So what are the other 62mb being used for?! This happens in standalone or as a VST in Cubase.

Another thing I noticed is if I switch the override buffer thing on and off then Kontakt gradually starts to eat more memory with no apparent limit. Obviously this isn't a huge deal in normal use but it does seem to indicate some sort of memory leak going on.

Going back to the previous thing, I built a big orchestral template in Cubase, by the time it was finished I'd topped out at about 9.3gb ram, I thought this was a little high considering how small the buffer was for everything so I counted up the reported sample use in every instance of Kontakt and it reached about 5gb. This was with around 15 instances of Kontakt. I just don't understand where the extra 4gb of ram is going?

Which brings me to my final question: my computer actually only has 8gb of ram, but was still handling everything fine despite Cubase taking up a reported 9.3gb. I assume this is because the system is running on the SSD as well so virtual memory is being handled a lot faster than it would be on a normal harddrive. My worry though is will this be slowly killing my SSD because of the constant writes/reads to virtual memory? I heard somewhere that writing creates more wear on an SSD than reading, so if this is the case then I presume I'll have to keep the physical ram usage down below 8gb to ensure my SSD doesn't die on me?

Thanks for any advice.

 

Yes, this is known. Lowest DFD buffer sizes actually have somewhat higher RAM usage for some reason...

Also note that samples are not the only thing that consume RAM. Time Machine modes, number of groups in each instrument, number of zones in each instrument, number of effects and modulators in each instrument, amount of graphics used by scripting, maximum voice limit in each instrument, it all impacts total RAM usage to varying extent.


P.S.: As a precaution you should probably disable swap file on your SSD partition. Rather use an USB stick for ReadyBoost instead.

 

Ah that's interesting, so what's the ideal buffer size for the lowest ram usage?

And yes I see what you're saying but it's still surprising how much extra ram is needed for things other than samples (nearly 1.5x the amount used for the sample buffer!), but I admit to having zero knowledge of the inner workings on Kontakt!

I ran the Samsung SSD software and it recommended dropping the swap file to 1gig, which I did, and when loading the template again Windows quickly told me to close Cubase before I ran out of memory. Conclusion: time for a new rig!