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.

SupaReels

RIGHT!

I have been experiencing this delay in loading my projects ( Cubase 12 Pro ) . I use 4 SSD drives and an M2 motherboard chip.

It has been taking up to 5 min sometimes longer to project load and NI s samples up to 3 mins .. for me and a lot of people here and on YT it is so frustrating that it destroys your musical ides and you become a second rate IT guy and a very frustrated muso ... so I gave up mixing and writing songs to try and get to the bottom of my problem .. here goes ..

Although everything in my PC is SSD and my NI samples are on a separate drive, I checked the win defender and did all the bits I could to speed things up ... nothing worked ... The problem it seemed was not that the samples were on an SSD but that ( Looking at the SSD specs ) the SSD itself seemed to be read and writing slower than the motherboard M2 chip (blisteringly fast).

So after much thought and two hole days and one night .. I transferred the NI native content over to my 'C' drive ( the M2 ).

This morning I loaded my biggest file for Cubase and it took just under 3 mins ( there were 12 NI plus a load of FX etc ).

My NI content was loading with either KT / KO in seconds. I am so happy as I love my NI samples and the S88 mk2 ( plus machine ) I nearly ditched all of it in favour of my songwriting.

The upshot is although I tried all the help there was available to me I still had a loading delay. So not all SSDs are the same when it comes to a quick fix ... I cant say it would work for everyone because it seems to be the norm not to use your C drive for NI content, which for the record is a WD BLACK SN850 GEN 4 With a 7000 MB/sec read speed. All my other SSDs are Blue tagged and much slower than WD Black chip .. Interestingly my other sample content Halion, Groove Agent, Padshop, Spitfire and more all load fine ... just NI Content ?? well I don't understand but hey It worked !!

I really hope this report will help someone in the same boat as I was.🤗