Does RAM help with CPU Overload

[Casey H]

RAM and CPU are entirely different components within a computer. Think of the CPU as your brain and RAM is your work desk. Your brain can only process so much information... if you have two documents on your desk two fill out, or a stack of a hundred, your brain can only process so much information at once. Getting a bigger desk makes it easier to store all of those documents, you can arrange them in categories, ergonomically, etc... but your brain is still the limiting factor.

While it may not be enough in all cases, adding more RAM can reduce CPU load because the more RAM, the less type spent swapping segments between RAM and disk drive. The continual swapping does take processor resources and slows things down. This is especially true when mechanical hard drives are involved-- may not be as noticeable with SSD.

So, it's always good to have as much RAM as possible and it never hurts to try adding more as first solution. Again, adding RAM won't solve all problems and DAW and related functionality take a ton of brainpower.

[Paulie]

I should have asked earlier, are you Mac or PC? The two platforms are different, you need far less RAM on a Mac than you do on a PC for similar workloads. And RAM is rarely a limiting factor for the DAW in general... something I see ignored too often is disk speed and network latency. If all of your audio files and samples are on an internal SSD, you are good to go. But, if your content is on an external drive, disk speed and connection speed matter. Go with SSD and firewire when possible.

[BradGray]

Just adding in a few comments to the thread to clarify.

1) More RAM WILL NOT improve CPU performance.

2) More RAM will help, IF your RAM is maxing out (check out task manager in windows).
- When RAM maxes out, (I.E. If your system needs 17GB and you only have 16GB of RAM), it will swap data to/from your hard drives, to cover the difference.
- If RAM is not 100% consumed, then adding more will not matter in the slightest.
- Disk Drives will really impact this swapping, depending on the speed of the drive. I.E. HDD (Spindle drives may get 80MB per second r/w, SSD Drives will get about 700MB r/w, NVMe drives can get around 3000MB r/w).

3) Drive speed will help the application performance. You can have a combination of drives. I run NVMe for my workstation and DAW, and use SSDs to back up the data. HDDs are also a cheaper long-term-storage option.

Now CPU's and audio, from what I dove into last year, are a bit unique. CPUs have two things to consider - number of COREs on a Chip and the Clock Speed. More cores = more processing power. Clock speed - the processing speed. With Audio applications, I believe that the individual tracks cannot be split among each core, to distribute the processing (CPU) load. I.E. Picture two tracks, and a 4 core processor. Track 1 has 10 plugins running, and track two has three. You could run into a processing issue, as Track 1 would push the entire processing stream to one of the available cores, and track two to another core - vs distributing the load. That's why having a faster clock speed will also assist as a 4.1Ghz processor may handle the work better than than a 3.2Ghz, even if the 3.2 has more cores. Please note, this is true of Audio applications, and not general PC apps.

However, all that said, start by changing the buffers in your DAW before you start looking for a new PC. =)

Hope that helps. For the record, while I'd love to be a Music Pro (why I'm here) my secret daytime identity is that of an IT Pro.

Cheers,
Brad