Kontakt 6.7.1 Extremely Slow Loading

Lowkus

Libraries that used to load in seconds are now taking over a minute to load in Kontakt 6.7.1. Possibly the slowness began in one of the prior minor versions, I skipped a few when I updated it. The delay is not due to the size of the libraries, it seems to be that the "loading status" window doesn't open until after the program has sat frozen for a while. I'm running a Ryzen 9 5950X with SSD and 128GB memory, Win10 Pro with the latest updates, and an NVidia 3090 video card, so it for sure is not my computer being slow. The Native Instruments programmers seem to have screwed something up. Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

EvilDragon

Unfortunately I cannot confirm this behavior over here (and there haven't been many reports of this from what I can tell, which means we're dealing with an isolated incident likely) - but at the very least I can tell that it doesn't matter if you skip certain minor point updates, as the latest update always contains all previous ones (obviously).

Certain things that spring to mind:

1. Windows Defender/Security. This thing can scan files on open at random. And the one thing that Kontakt does all the time is opening a bunch of files in order to stream them from the disk! It helps to add scanning exclusions for file types that Kontakt uses (NKI, NKM, NKB, NKX, NKC, NKR, WAV, AIF, AIFF, RX2, NCW - for starters)
2. If at all possible, always install sample libraries on a separate drive from your system drive. SSDs are fast, yes, but it's better when Kontakt doesn't have to "fight" with OS file read/write requests to the same drive.
3. nVidia drivers can be a downright biaaaatch sometimes, creating spurious and random problems in anything that is not a game... They have two flavors of their drivers - the usual one everyone installs is focused to the bone on gaming performance and is the troublesome one in our case. The other flavor is more behaved and polite and should hopefully work out better in our case. I don't know how they call these two flavors, please investigate a bit. Also, AMD GPUs usually don't have any such issues. Plus, their drivers don't induce nearly as much DPC latency as nVidia's, which impacts your CPU performance and in the end how your DAW performs latency-wise too.

EvilDragon

Unfortunately I cannot confirm this behavior over here (and there haven't been many reports of this from what I can tell, which means we're dealing with an isolated incident likely) - but at the very least I can tell that it doesn't matter if you skip certain minor point updates, as the latest update always contains all previous ones (obviously).

Certain things that spring to mind:

1. Windows Defender/Security. This thing can scan files on open at random. And the one thing that Kontakt does all the time is opening a bunch of files in order to stream them from the disk! It helps to add scanning exclusions for file types that Kontakt uses (NKI, NKM, NKB, NKX, NKC, NKR, WAV, AIF, AIFF, RX2, NCW - for starters)
2. If at all possible, always install sample libraries on a separate drive from your system drive. SSDs are fast, yes, but it's better when Kontakt doesn't have to "fight" with OS file read/write requests to the same drive.
3. nVidia drivers can be a downright biaaaatch sometimes, creating spurious and random problems in anything that is not a game... They have two flavors of their drivers - the usual one everyone installs is focused to the bone on gaming performance and is the troublesome one in our case. The other flavor is more behaved and polite and should hopefully work out better in our case. I don't know how they call these two flavors, please investigate a bit. Also, AMD GPUs usually don't have any such issues. Plus, their drivers don't induce nearly as much DPC latency as nVidia's, which impacts your CPU performance and in the end how your DAW performs latency-wise too.

Lowkus

I have my libraries on a separate SSD from the one the OS is on. I am running only Windows Defender which should not be enough to slow the file reading process. I will switch my video card to the studio driver instead of the gaming driver, but that's something that still seems unlikely to impact the application to where I'm waiting half an hour for the thing to open. One thing I've noticed though is that after I've opened a library it seems to open faster the next time, for example I loaded Omnidrums last night and after about an hour of waiting for it to open I decided to go to sleep, and when I woke up today I found it was open. I closed Kontakt, opened it again and loaded Omnidrums, and this time it only took about five minutes to open. And then I closed Kontakt and I opened it again and this time Omnidrums only took about fifteen seconds to load. It all seems very weird.

EvilDragon

Defender can definitely slow things down on file open, please add exclusions to NI file formats as suggested.

First load after a cold boot is always going to be slower, once you load an insturment, any subsequent loads are expected to be faster because OS caches files for faster acces then.