Networking On or Off when running my DaW?

[masimon]

People tell me that I should turn networking off when running my DAW. Why?

[Pat Azzarello]

Note that while I'm an active member of these forums, I'm also a Microsoft employee. These comments are my own, based on my own experience, but may offer better or more accurate insights or observations because of my "day job."

In general, I keep networking turned off, except as absolutely necessary. That said, I've left networking turned on (i.e., after a Windows Update I didn't disable it) for long periods of time, opened up my DAW and created for hours without seeing any issues. In my home studio I keep networking turned off for three reasons:
1. Any process (or software activity running on your PC) requires CPU activity, and I want my DAW to focus on audio.
2. Network activity can be surprising. Bad apps can be sending and receiving information while you're creating music, and that can have an effect on performance. Even apps that are trying to do good things (Windows update or anti-virus software) phoning home to see if there are updates can ruin that perfect recording pass.
3. Some network drivers and utilities are not written to be efficient for the system, and take long DPC's. In a typical office or home setting, some network process taking 50 or 100 ms is not going to be noticable (think about how little a 100 ms delay in writing an email would impact you), but in audio content creation, especially recording, this can be devastating.

BTW: DPC's - forgive me for not remember the definition of the acronym - basically take an exclusive hold on the processor while they work, which is not good for audio (and it's not only network drivers that do this, some of the worst offenders are video drivers). Microsoft is working hard to identify the worst offenders here and work with the driver vendors to fix them.

[Steve_Karl]

I use 4 machines on a network to do music and sometimes they're all on and being used during the process.
I can't imagine why someone would tell you to keep the network off, unless they meant the the WAN as opposed to the LAN.

[lukpcn]

I use 4 machines on a network to do music and sometimes they're all on and being used during the process.
I can't imagine why someone would tell you to keep the network off, unless they meant the the WAN as opposed to the LAN.

Maybe they are talking about internet access kept off, not the local network. :rolleyes:

[Houston Haynes]

If someone's using FXTeleport, I would think that turning OFF networking on a PC would be counter-productive.

[lukpcn]

If someone's using FXTeleport, I would think that turning OFF networking on a PC would be counter-productive.

Well said Houston :samurai:

[Daryl]

Maybe with a new super-computer running Vista we won't need FXT anymore.

D

[Robert Kooijman]

Great forum!

Fwiw, been messing and tuning for days to optimise audio performance at low latency. At the moment, almost every service and every network controller (serial, parallel, IEE 1394, LAN) is disabled. While this looks good in the task manager (only about a dozen processes running), the difference has proven to be negligible!

I'm still in the process of getting to the bottom of exactly what hapens when audio glitches occur.
So far, also after messing with various BIOS settings and moving PCI and PCIE cards around in virtually all combinations, my conclusion is that the graphics card PCIE I/O is the single most relevant issue. I'm using a modest 6600GT dual DVI card, and would love be able to tune some low level settings. Unfortunately, there's no PCI latency timer in effect for PCIE, and NVIDIA's standard drivers don't give much options to play with.

Crazy at is may sound, a 32MB PCI Matrox might do more then all possible tweaks combined! Anyone with more experience here?

[Steve_Karl]

This has been extensively explored by a few people on the Cakewalk Sonar forum. If you get no usable answers here, maybe try over there.

Unfortunately ( but fortunately for me ) I don't have any pci-E(vil) here.