Hello,
Jeff Deno of Steinberg US has been quite responsive on the topic, currently he’s attempting to get the German developers involved. Our N7 acquisition systems have been downgraded to N5.5.6 until this is resolved but I’m not happy about using an old OS without security updates.
Here’s a copy of what I most recently sent them -
Hello Jeff,
I figured I’d do my weekly problem check-in with some potentially helpful information for your developers.
I was testing hard drive performance today recording 192 tracks with different drive models. I noticed I could force N7 to do some unneeded drive reading during recording (a bad thing) by doing two things - scrolling vertically in the session, and resizing the project window by a small amount. Either of these would result in a few tens of megabytes of data being read off the record drive. This indicates to me Nuendo is thinking it needs to read waveform data off the drive to accommodate the new view. After scrolling vertically a few times the excessive read would stop, possibly confirming Nuendo had cached the data and no longer needed to read it.
In a previous version of Nuendo (N4?) the memory Nuendo required would steadily increase as recording continued because Nuendo would cache the waveform data in memory for fast navigation. I know this because Nuendo implemented that long before the 64-bit version for Mac was released causing us to not be able to use Nuendo for a period of time because we would run out of memory with large projects. Now with Nuendo 7 the memory does not steadily increase indicating the waveforms need to be read off the drive. This confirms my suspicion about drive reading during recording.
This is NOT the problem by itself because as I’ve previously mentioned the problematic reading is excessive with much higher read bandwidth which causes Nuendo to fail recording at high track counts. The previous failures have not involved scrolling or resizing, and they are at much higher read bandwidth. However it may be the vector by which Nuendo is thinking it needs to start doing a bunch of drive reading. Scrolling or resizing causes a few tens of megabytes of reading then stops the reading, when Nuendo 7 starts the problem originally described the read bandwidth is so high and continuous there’s no recovery except to restart Nuendo.
The N7 systems are on the east coast and have been downgraded to N5.5 for now, doing the Tony Awards and several other shows. I don’t expect to see them back for a couple of months but I look forward to testing any progress your developers make on our testbed system in the studio. Our other systems are still at N5.5 until this is resolved.
We’ll see what they come up with.
Hugh