Is this normal? I'll make something and it will have no problem with CPU, I come back a week later and open the file and it can barely play. And even when I hit pause the CPU remains at 90ish percent. 4 groups and 2 plugins…nothing crazy
you may want to look into your system… and look to see whats taking place in the background…
some things to look for..
are updates/diskaccess occurring
which ground processes have Cpu-usage(what happens if i close that process)
there is very little you can do on the maschine software side… beside having your audio sample rate matched to system and then setting the buffersize
if of course you are running something like a dualcore laptop… as you dont provide any further insight
we can only guess you have a lowend laptop running 4gb, which will run as you described