Tom ConnerI love SD3, but my largest complaint is slow preset load times. I did take The Drum Angle guy’s advice from his video where he recommended unlimited layer limits – and having all samples available for each instrument seems like a good idea. But yes unfortutately this makes some presets really large and slow loading, like Legacy of Rock/Oyster Ambience at 15.3GB.
I had heard people talking about how storing your drum libraries on a different drive than your OS can speed things up. So I measured how long a bunch of different presets took to load with the libraries on my OS drive, and then moved them all to a second same model SSD drive and measured again. The results are that where before my presets loaded from 9 seconds for the smallest to 29 seconds for the largest, after moving the libraries they loaded from 7 to 22 seconds. On average they loaded 22% faster, with some as much as 36% faster. That’s a big improvement!
So yes, assuming you have a fast second internal drive it is definitely better to move the libraries to it. Now if I could find another big loading time improvement to speed things up more. Anybody know any?
(Details: My laptop is Windows 11, 14th gen intel cpu, 96gb of ram, with two fast Western Digital SN850X SSD’s, and I formatted the secondary ssd with the largest NTFS allocation unit size – which is supposed to be faster for large files.)
DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s/eDRUMin, RME Fireface interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio Amp, Porter & Davies transducer, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 (State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, Stories)
BlueMistralDoes your laptop have thunderbolt 4 ports? your SSD’s are fast enough but if you only have USB 3.1 ports then they can’t achieve maximum speed. I have recently bought an external thunderbolt 4 enclosure, put a 2tb samsung ssd in it and I went from a WD 3.1 speeds at 621 MB to almost 2.4 GB reading time, so 4 times faster. My biggest kit is from Stories and is around 12 GB, it loads now in 4 seconds at the most.
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Thanked by: drumjack52
Bear-Faced CowMy USB-C SSD Drive and and my thunderbolt SSD drive get around the same loading time of 7 to 10 seconds on a 20 GB preset.
In your Library/Paths settings do you have all of your libraries set for SSD?
jord
Tom ConnerMy laptop has a Thunderbolt 4 port, but I moved my libraries from my main internal SSD to a second internal SSD, and both are PCIE4 x4 which has a higher max transfer speed than thunderbolt 4. And yes all libraries are set to SSD.
But I don’t think SSD speed is the biggest factor in load time. If you watch disk performance while loading a preset it is sporadic and not maxed out. The max theoretical transfer rate of PCIE4 x4 is 8GB per second – nowhere close to loading a 15GB preset in 20 seconds. The CPU isn’t fully utilized either during preset loading, and neither is memory which has a much faster transfer rate than SSDs anyway. I would love to know where the bottleneck is for preset loading. I suspect the code is not optimized/profiled, and not so much drive or cpu speed.
One thing I have noticed when measuring preset load times is that it’s dependent on what preset was loaded before. If you load a preset from a library followed by a similar one with many of the same intruments the load time will be much faster, I think since it is retainining those intruments in memory. And if the last preset was a really big one it takes longer to clear that out before the new one starts loading. When you said you loaded a 20GB preset in 7-10 seconds, where any of the same instruments in the prior preset? And are you starting the clock right when you click the new preset name, or after the last preset is cleared out? Thanks! I would love to have load times that fast.
DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s/eDRUMin, RME Fireface interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio Amp, Porter & Davies transducer, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 (State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, Stories)
BradMy laptop has a Thunderbolt 4 port, but I moved my libraries from my main internal SSD to a second internal SSD, and both are PCIE4 x4 which has a higher max transfer speed than thunderbolt 4. And yes all libraries are set to SSD.
But I don’t think SSD speed is the biggest factor in load time. If you watch disk performance while loading a preset it is sporadic and not maxed out. The max theoretical transfer rate of PCIE4 x4 is 8GB per second – nowhere close to loading a 15GB preset in 20 seconds. The CPU isn’t fully utilized either during preset loading, and neither is memory which has a much faster transfer rate than SSDs anyway. I would love to know where the bottleneck is for preset loading. I suspect the code is not optimized/profiled, and not so much drive or cpu speed.
One thing I have noticed when measuring preset load times is that it’s dependent on what preset was loaded before. If you load a preset from a library followed by a similar one with many of the same intruments the load time will be much faster, I think since it is retainining those intruments in memory. And if the last preset was a really big one it takes longer to clear that out before the new one starts loading. When you said you loaded a 20GB preset in 7-10 seconds, where any of the same instruments in the prior preset? And are you starting the clock right when you click the new preset name, or after the last preset is cleared out? Thanks! I would love to have load times that fast.
Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.4.0
Operating system: Windows 11
Hi Tom,
Hopefully this doesn’t come off as a dumb question, but… you did change the settings of disk type to SSD in Libraries/Paths, yes?
Mac Studio M1 Max, RAM 64 GB, 1TB Drive, OSX 12.x/13.x and Windows 10 (VM)
DAW: Studio One Pro (always up to date)
DTX Express III (Extreme triggers), Nektar LX88
OWC Thunderbay Mini (4 X 1TB Sata SSD), Express 4M2 (4 X 2TB M.2 SSD), Envoy Express (1TB M.2 SSD)
Presonus Quantum, Faderport & Faderport 8
Black Lion Sparrow Mk2 A/D, FMR-RNP-RNC, MIDI Xpress 128, BM5A, KRK VXT4, Equator D5
2020 Macbook Pro 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Audio(mobile rig)
Tom ConnerI did, thanks. Brad, how long does it take your largest preset to load?
DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s/eDRUMin, RME Fireface interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio Amp, Porter & Davies transducer, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 (State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, Stories)
BradI did, thanks. Brad, how long does it take your largest preset to load?
Operating system: Windows 11
- This post was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by Tom Conner.
Well here’s something funny (funny hmmmm, not funny ha ha)…. system had been up for about a week, running Studio One, multiple sessions, started SD3 in a new session and loaded Legacy of Rock > Oyster Ambience from an M.2 SSD. Around 26 seconds.
Rebooted the system, running SD3 standalone, same preset: 12 seconds.
Mac Studio M1 Max, RAM 64 GB, 1TB Drive, OSX 12.x/13.x and Windows 10 (VM)
DAW: Studio One Pro (always up to date)
DTX Express III (Extreme triggers), Nektar LX88
OWC Thunderbay Mini (4 X 1TB Sata SSD), Express 4M2 (4 X 2TB M.2 SSD), Envoy Express (1TB M.2 SSD)
Presonus Quantum, Faderport & Faderport 8
Black Lion Sparrow Mk2 A/D, FMR-RNP-RNC, MIDI Xpress 128, BM5A, KRK VXT4, Equator D5
2020 Macbook Pro 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Audio(mobile rig)
Tom ConnerI did, thanks. Brad, how long does it take your largest preset to load?
Operating system: Windows 11
- This post was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by Tom Conner.
Well here’s something funny (funny hmmmm, not funny ha ha)…. system had been up for about a week, running Studio One, multiple sessions, started SD3 in a new session and loaded Legacy of Rock > Oyster Ambience from an M.2 SSD. Around 26 seconds.
Rebooted the system, running SD3 standalone, same preset: 12 seconds.
Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.4.0
Operating system: macOS Sequoia (15)
That is funny “hmmmm”. I imagine something had maybe leaked memory over the time your computer was on, not sure since I don’t know Macs. Thanks for checking the load time – is that the default Oyster Ambience patch or a user preset you edited?
DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s/eDRUMin, RME Fireface interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio Amp, Porter & Davies transducer, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 (State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, Stories)
BradI did, thanks. Brad, how long does it take your largest preset to load?
Operating system: Windows 11
- This post was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by Tom Conner.
Well here’s something funny (funny hmmmm, not funny ha ha)…. system had been up for about a week, running Studio One, multiple sessions, started SD3 in a new session and loaded Legacy of Rock > Oyster Ambience from an M.2 SSD. Around 26 seconds.
Rebooted the system, running SD3 standalone, same preset: 12 seconds.
Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.4.0
Operating system: macOS Sequoia (15)That is funny “hmmmm”. I imagine something had maybe leaked memory over the time your computer was on, not sure since I don’t know Macs. Thanks for checking the load time – is that the default Oyster Ambience patch or a user preset you edited?
Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.4.0
Operating system: Windows 11
Stock Oyster Ambience patch. I just changed the CPU cores to 2 in SD3 as the new version of Studio One documentation indicates the S1 uses efficiency cores as well as performance cores, so I will try to track whether this improves performance.
Mac Studio M1 Max, RAM 64 GB, 1TB Drive, OSX 12.x/13.x and Windows 10 (VM)
DAW: Studio One Pro (always up to date)
DTX Express III (Extreme triggers), Nektar LX88
OWC Thunderbay Mini (4 X 1TB Sata SSD), Express 4M2 (4 X 2TB M.2 SSD), Envoy Express (1TB M.2 SSD)
Presonus Quantum, Faderport & Faderport 8
Black Lion Sparrow Mk2 A/D, FMR-RNP-RNC, MIDI Xpress 128, BM5A, KRK VXT4, Equator D5
2020 Macbook Pro 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Audio(mobile rig)
Tom ConnerOk. And yep, me loading the stock Oyster Ambience kit is about 12 seconds as well, and about double that if all the layer limits are maxed.
DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s/eDRUMin, RME Fireface interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio Amp, Porter & Davies transducer, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 (State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, Stories)
Bear-Faced CowJust for poops & giggles, I tested the Oyster Ambience with no limits (created a preset). Quit & re-launched Superior Drummer and went to my other go to libraries and loaded a huge kit (didn’t time it but it went quick). Loaded a few other kits and then went back to this SDX and loaded my custom Oyster Ambience preset – 12 seconds. The only real delay I had was Superior Drummer looking up the preset data, which I will assume is an SQLIte thing.
jord
Tom ConnerJust for poops & giggles, I tested the Oyster Ambience with no limits (created a preset). Quit & re-launched Superior Drummer and went to my other go to libraries and loaded a huge kit (didn’t time it but it went quick). Loaded a few other kits and then went back to this SDX and loaded my custom Oyster Ambience preset – 12 seconds. The only real delay I had was Superior Drummer looking up the preset data, which I will assume is an SQLIte thing.
jord
Jordan, what size is that preset now?
DWe six piece kit, Roland BT-1s/eDRUMin, RME Fireface interface, JH Audio IEMs w/Fiio Amp, Porter & Davies transducer, Razer 16 laptop, SD3 (State of the Art, Stockholm, Hitmaker, Legacy of Rock, Decades, Death & Darkness, Fields of Rock, Stories)
Bear-Faced Cow
Shen GCries in 15 second load time for the default Oyster Ambience kit.
This is from a Crucial T500 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD. It benches around 6.5GB/s peak. Real world copies (eg the Legacy of Rock folder) at around 3.5GB/s until I presume the SLC cache runs out on the Samsung 980 PRO I’m copying to. But never seems to top around 1GB/s when loading kits, often around 500MB/s.
I speculated in another thread discussing this that the decrypting/decompressing process is single threaded perhaps. I notice CPU usage staying around that 12.5% a lot on an 8 core CPU, even if SMT is on. The only time I’ve noticed much higher usage is on kits with more processing going on, particularly pitch shifted instruments.
So I suspect it’s my Ryzen 5700x holding ME back. Win 10, 32GB’s of ram, set to 8 cores and SSD’s in SD3.
Getting better utilisation from the hardware would be great TT 🙂
edit: speeling
SD3 with Fields of Rock, Death and Darkness, Real to Reel, Legacy of Rock, Stories, Hitmaker, Decades, State of the Art, Stockholm, Jazz Sessions, Hansa, Rock Foundry, Area 33 (in order of preference). Plus a few older SDX's and EZX's.
Into: Reaper with Ryzen 5700x, 32GB RAM and assorted SSD's.
Through: Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 Gen2 USB Audio Interface
From: eDRUMin 10 + eDRUMin 8 with assorted Roland and Yamaha pads.
bpjacobsenI just purchased a 2TB Samsung EVO Plus on which I put all my SD3 Libraries and samples etc. pretty much just SD3 files. I did a system migration from my original 500 gb that came with the beelink and put that on a 1tb SATA SSD to be used for just the OS. So running SD3 on a gen4 M2 PCIe (also supports Gen5 so it will be moved to my future pc build if/when I get around to it) I used Diskgenius to clone the OS to the SATA SSD which was pretty painless (and free!) only thing I had to do was convert the partition to GPT on the SATA first, since Windows 11 only supports one MBR partition apparently. The key is making sure the drive letter is the same as it was before so I don’t have to reload any of my external samples and so it can find the libraries like before. Anyway, definitely better load time. I went from around 20 to 30 seconds to between 8 and 12 average loading my many instruments for my large kit on various D&D, Legacy of Rock, Fields of Rock libraries/presets. And now I have ample room to add a few more libraries when I decide to purchase more.
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