Q: What is the point of the CPU Limit option in Prefs?

[SA Studio]

Ok.

I seriously solve many people's problems a month on Facebook when they're asking about performance and "CPU too slow to play song".

I advise them to set their CPU Limit to NONE, and they come back thanking me and praising me for helping them out.

This has literally gone on for a few years now. It's about time Props remove that option, IMO. From social media, I can EAAAAASILY confirm to you guys the MASSIVE amount of people who have "CPU too slow" who have never touched that setting in Preferences.

Odds are, they never will either. They don't know that's the problem. So they'll never change it and they end up using Reason in a hampered state.

That option needs to go. If I had a dollar for every person I've helped their issues with with that setting, I'd seriously have some $$$$. At least once a week I solve this for someone, easily.

Anyone know the point and purpose of that setting? I think it has to go.

[Kenni]

There can be various reasons for that. I would personally never let any one application utilize 100% of my CPU if I actually had the option of controlling that. One app utilizing 100% CPU is rarely a perfect idea. It can spawn weird side effects, especially from software that are very read/write dependent and/or has integration layers (like ReWire/VST host). People that know their hardware might not want the CPU to heat as much as it does when running 100% because the fan is too noisy, or even worse, the fan isn't powerful enough to cool the CPU at 100%.

I/O errors, random bugs, thread instability, GUI lockups, and of course the reduced lifetime of your hardware can be a few of the reasons to keep that option in Reason.

[normen]

Simple reason is that the system might need a bit of CPU at points. So if the DAW uses 99% and the system needs 2% thats a guaranteed dropout. It's basically like the MIDI throughput percentage in Logics control surface preferences.

[Kenni]

Or that! ^

[jwd606]

So what would be a sensible level to set the Reason CPU usage limit at?

[normen]

So what would be a sensible level to set the Reason CPU usage limit at?

It depends. If you can live with dropouts being the sign that you can't load any plugins anymore you don't need it at all. If you use Reason live or for recording you should probably set it to a reasonable amount that allows you to load the plugins you need but still leaves room to breathe for the system. I guess 80 is quite safe.

[TritoneAddiction]

I agree. On all the computers I've used Reason, setting the CPU limit to None has always worked best. I don't mind the option to change the setting, but maybe it would be better to have None as the default setting.

[CaliforniaBurrito]

People that know their hardware might not want the CPU to heat as much as it does when running 100% because the fan is too noisy, or even worse, the fan isn't powerful enough to cool the CPU at 100%.

This happened to me during a couple sessions last week as I was also running some video software. My system completely shut down to avoid overheating.

[AttenuationHz]

I've always set to 95% unless really really needing to finish something before bouncing. If it is running and hitting 100% all the time chances are it might cause damage.

[Oquasec]

Extra options for stability reasons most likely.

[SA Studio]

There can be various reasons for that. I would personally never let any one application utilize 100% of my CPU if I actually had the option of controlling that. One app utilizing 100% CPU is rarely a perfect idea. It can spawn weird side effects, especially from software that are very read/write dependent and/or has integration layers (like ReWire/VST host). People that know their hardware might not want the CPU to heat as much as it does when running 100% because the fan is too noisy, or even worse, the fan isn't powerful enough to cool the CPU at 100%.

I/O errors, random bugs, thread instability, GUI lockups, and of course the reduced lifetime of your hardware can be a few of the reasons to keep that option in Reason.

But setting the CPU limit to none in Reason is not going to let Reason take 100% of your CPU.

This does not explain why that option is there to me. There is no downside of setting the CPU Limit to NONE in Reason. There really is no downside. The only thing it does is cause problems for the people who don't even know that setting is there.

"Extra options for stability" ~ Again, while I don't disagree with that, there's literally leagues of people who don't know that setting is what's making them see the "CPU TOO SLOW TO PLAY SONG" error.

"It depends. If you can live with dropouts being the sign that you can't load any plugins anymore you don't need it at all. If you use Reason live or for recording you should probably set it to a reasonable amount that allows you to load the plugins you need but still leaves room to breathe for the system. I guess 80 is quite safe."

I personally fully disagree with this. There are no dropouts when the limit is set to none. NONE is a completely safe setting. I'm also a professional at what I do, Normen = Thousands and literal thousands of hours with Reason with the CPU set to none and there's no dropouts, man.

Reason does not drop-out when the CPU limit is set to none. It doesn't. That setting causes a lot of problmes for people and in all my experience working with multiple DAWs, etc, I can't for the life of me figure out the point of that setting and I think it's time it goes away. No other DAW has a CPU limit setting and frankly there's no point or purpose to one.

[SA Studio]

I've always set to 95% unless really really needing to finish something before bouncing. If it is running and hitting 100% all the time chances are it might cause damage.

Might cause damage?

To what?

[SA Studio]

So what would be a sensible level to set the Reason CPU usage limit at?

Set it to None.

There will be no problems, no temporal worm-hole will open and swallow your studio. Thousands of hours with the CPU limit set to none and I've never had any remote issues.

[normen]

I personally fully disagree with this. There are no dropouts when the limit is set to none. NONE is a completely safe setting. I'm also a professional at what I do, Normen = Thousands and literal thousands of hours with Reason with the CPU set to none and there's no dropouts, man.

Reason does not drop-out when the CPU limit is set to none. It doesn't. That setting causes a lot of problmes for people and in all my experience working with multiple DAWs, etc, I can't for the life of me figure out the point of that setting and I think it's time it goes away. No other DAW has a CPU limit setting and frankly there's no point or purpose to one.

Of course there is no dropouts if you don't overload the system.

The thought behind what I said is this: You are in a recording situation - you add another plugin not realizing you now use 95% of the CPU when Reason is recording because it works for the 30 seconds you tested it. Now you press "record" and the singer puts down the performance of her life until one minute in - crackle - pop - no more backing track. Reason stopped because of CPU overload as the system had to do whatever. If you had enabled at least "90%" in the settings you would have gotten a warning right at the beginning after adding that new plugin.

Now sure, you can take apart this explanation all the way you want - I don't see a reason to NOT have the option

Edit: Note the DSP meter doesn't show CPU load, it shows roundtrip time in relation to buffer size, it doesn't "know" when the CPU is actually at its limit, it only measures that by the time it needs. So you can't really "see" CPU load there either.

[SA Studio]

I personally fully disagree with this. There are no dropouts when the limit is set to none. NONE is a completely safe setting. I'm also a professional at what I do, Normen = Thousands and literal thousands of hours with Reason with the CPU set to none and there's no dropouts, man.

Reason does not drop-out when the CPU limit is set to none. It doesn't. That setting causes a lot of problmes for people and in all my experience working with multiple DAWs, etc, I can't for the life of me figure out the point of that setting and I think it's time it goes away. No other DAW has a CPU limit setting and frankly there's no point or purpose to one.

Of course there is no dropouts if you don't overload the system.

The thought behind what I said is this: You are in a recording situation - you add another plugin not realizing you now use 95% of the CPU when Reason is recording because it works for the 30 seconds you tested it. Now you press "record" and the singer puts down the performance of her life until one minute in - crackle - pop - no more backing track. Reason stopped because of CPU overload as the system had to do whatever. If you had enabled at least "90%" in the settings you would have gotten a warning right at the beginning after adding that new plugin.

Now sure, you can take apart this explanation all the way you want - I don't see a reason to NOT have the option

:/

Ehhhhh. The option only hinders users. Its pretty much the #1 problem on Facebook in all the major groups. Literally, there's a person who complains nearly daily and if you tell them to set it to "None"....they come back cheering. The setting's gotta go. No other DAW has it because it's a non-issue. There's no point to it.

[normen]

:/

Ehhhhh. The option only hinders users. Its pretty much the #1 problem on Facebook in all the major groups. Literally, there's a person who complains nearly daily and if you tell them to set it to "None"....they come back cheering. The setting's gotta go. No other DAW has it because it's a non-issue. There's no point to it.

Well if you also consider that Reason was initially meant as a companion application to other DAWs you can't really say theres no point to that option in general. If the default setting makes sense now that most use Reason as a standalone DAW? I guess that can be debated.

[CaliforniaBurrito]

It is nice to have options. I had it set to 100% for the longest time, to the point of forgetting about the usage, and it scared the out of me when my system unexpectedly shut down while doing video.

[AttenuationHz]

^^^that sort of damage.

It shuts down to protect itself, from frying altogether. Most who don't know about the too slow message would probably have a stock cpu fan and not monitor temperatures.

[Exowildebeest]

You really shouldn't worry about utilizing 100% of your CPU if it's properly cooled.

I always have Reason set to "none" and regularly produce through the crackles.

[Exowildebeest]

Of course there is no dropouts if you don't overload the system.

The thought behind what I said is this: You are in a recording situation - you add another plugin not realizing you now use 95% of the CPU when Reason is recording because it works for the 30 seconds you tested it. Now you press "record" and the singer puts down the performance of her life until one minute in - crackle - pop - no more backing track. Reason stopped because of CPU overload as the system had to do whatever. If you had enabled at least "90%" in the settings you would have gotten a warning right at the beginning after adding that new plugin.

Now sure, you can take apart this explanation all the way you want - I don't see a reason to NOT have the option

:/

Ehhhhh. The option only hinders users. Its pretty much the #1 problem on Facebook in all the major groups. Literally, there's a person who complains nearly daily and if you tell them to set it to "None"....they come back cheering. The setting's gotta go. No other DAW has it because it's a non-issue. There's no point to it.

That's just incompetence.

Maybe what AttenuationHz said is true: these people are probably not going to break their PC sooner rather than later. Best to protect them against themselves

[SA Studio]

^^^that sort of damage.

It shuts down to protect itself, from frying altogether. Most who don't know about the too slow message would probably have a stock cpu fan and not monitor temperatures.

I disagree 1000% = There's not one part of what you said that's factual. Reason doesn't shut it self down. "Frying"????

There is no damage that could happen when set to NONE in prefs and I have used it on NONE for literally thousands of hours.

There is no damage that could possibly happen from setting the CPU limit to none and I'd stake my career on that.

You think you run a risk of "frying" your computer with it set to None? Come on, that's not remotely realistic. Many...MANY users would have fried their system by now. Has anyone? No.

The setting needs to be taken out. It's ridiculous, frankly.

[SA Studio]

:/

Ehhhhh. The option only hinders users. Its pretty much the #1 problem on Facebook in all the major groups. Literally, there's a person who complains nearly daily and if you tell them to set it to "None"....they come back cheering. The setting's gotta go. No other DAW has it because it's a non-issue. There's no point to it.

That's just incompetence.

Maybe what AttenuationHz said is true: these people are probably not going to break their PC sooner rather than later. Best to protect them against themselves

No Reason user has ever "broken their CPU" by setting the CPU limit to none.

Ever. To assume you'd harm your CPU by setting the software limit to none is insane, man.

Enough is enough with that setting. It should be removed. You guys can't even properly explain why it's there.

[AttenuationHz]

[Kenni]

That's just incompetence.

Maybe what AttenuationHz said is true: these people are probably not going to break their PC sooner rather than later. Best to protect them against themselves [emoji38]

No Reason user has ever "broken their CPU" by setting the CPU limit to none.

Ever. To assume you'd harm your CPU by setting the software limit to none is insane, man.

Enough is enough with that setting. It should be removed. You guys can't even properly explain why it's there.

We did properly explain it. Even within the first 3 replies. You just refute it, and that's fine. Even if you're wrong.

[Kenni]

Also, the factual part about automatic shutdown had nothing to do with Reason, re-read the reply.

Automatic shutdowns is a normal CPU behavior when they get too hot