The plot thickens… Makes me want to know a lot more of a deeper understanding than I do about how computers work and their components interact together.
That makes perfect sense, I always thought of it as general system bottle necking, like sand waiting to pass through an hour glass.
And like I said, quite a while back when I brought my main DAW to the edge of space with never before seen demands of excessive VSTi’s & audio tracks (for that machine), I had to raise my latency to what I thought were extremely high (unusable for recording live tracks) levels, but was at least manageable for a mix down…this is when I began hearing those tracks play slightly out of time with each other. Realizing I was outgrowing my machine, I began offloading/externalizing as my solution. Now, my CPU & RAM are typically at 50% +/- … as for my disk usage, I’ve seen it from 50% to 65% or so, on the meter on my loaded up VSTi machine at actual projects. On my initial testing to realize it’s limits, I had the disk meter at a higher level than a real world project (maybe 85% or so), I believe I had to raise my latency from it’s lowest setting to only slightly higher.