Limits to how much Claudia can handle?

[PTPi]

I'm trying to set up a complete symphony orchestra using Claudia. My requirements are:
- 1 instance of MuseScore
- 5 channel splitters, loaded in 1 instance of Carla
- 74 .sf2 soundfonts (not soundbanks), loaded in 5 instances of Carla
- 3 instances of eq10q, loaded separately
- 6 instances of zita-rev1, loaded separately

The MuseScore has 5 midi_out ports with a total of 74 channels.
The channel splitters connect the correct ports/channels to soundfonts loaded in Carla. I'm using 1 instance of Carla each for woodwinds, brass, percussion, miscellaneous instruments, and strings.
The equalizers are needed to remove some screechiness from the high strings.
Audio output from the various "instruments" loaded in the 5 Carlas and the equalizers is connected to the zita-rev1s so that I can tailor the reverb for z-axis positioning of various instruments/sections of the orchestra.

When I try to set this up, I can only get so far before Claudia shuts down the Carla instance I'm adding sf2 plugins to, or refuses to let me add further plugins directly into Claudia (ie the reverberators and the equalizers). Is there a limit to how much I can load into Claudia? Or is this some sort of limit imposed by my system's resources?

[PTPi]

ladish/claudia is no longer being developed.
There issues like this, ie, loading heavy projects causes the SM to crash.
Unfortunately this was never fixed in ladish

Consider switching to NSM instead.
Its GUI leaves a lot of be desired.. but the basic elements are there.

I gave NSM a shot. Same problem. I reach a certain point loading plugins into Carla(s), then I can't add any more. It causes the Carla I try to load the plugin in to crash. FWIW, here's the exact setup. "Instruments" means .sf2 single-patch files (i.e. not soundbanks).

Musescore
Carla 1 - 6 midi splitters
Carla 2 - 16 instruments (woodwinds)
Carla 3 - 12 instruments (brass)
Carla 4 - 3 instruments (percussion)
Carla 5 - 3 instruments (misc.)

The last one, Carla 5, contains 1 harp, 1 tubular bells, 1 Steinway grand. When I try to add another instrument to Carla 5, no matter what it is, Carla 5 crashes. When I try to load the desired instrument into another of the running Carlas instead, that Carla crashes. So I guess there is some sort of limit to how much I can load into Carla. I'm wondering what the limit is (that is, if it's not 40, the number of plugins I can presently load), why there'd be a limit, and if there's anything I can do about it.

I've tried this with NSM and without, BTW.

[superprick]

Your list of plugins/instruments is quite large. what are your system specs. ram cpu. You very well could be hitting hardware limits

[PTPi]

That's what I'm trying to figure out. Monitoring my system, I see that I haven't touched swap yet, and CPU usage is well below maxed. The only thing I'm not watching closely is the DSP load because, to be honest, I'm not sure what it is. I have on occasion seen it go quite high. If that's the source of the problem, what would I have to upgrade to fix it?

[superprick]

DSP load is kinda subjective from what i can understand. Someone else can better answer this but from what i understand there is a buffer of time through which processing happens in jack before the sound is emitted from the speakers. You set the buffer perioud in samples 128 256 512 1024 etc. the higher the number the longer the delay. as the dsp percentage goes up the more time the processes you throw at it take.

so if your dsp load goes to 50 you are using 50 percent of the buffer time. if it spikes to 80 90 you get the point. xruns or dropouts. can be caused by system processes interrupting the dsp process or you can over run the allotted buffer time causing a reset.

looking at your instrument list.. unless the 16 woodwinds are completely separate dissimilar samples you are not really doing anything but eating up cpu cycles. with 34 samples going i would not expect this to run on anything less than a modern (last 5 years) quad core and at least 8 gigs of ram. A macbook pro of similar specs with osx will have issues with that kind of load and a latency under 10ms

having played with large orchestra arrangements on all three platforms linux mac windows. You really are aproaching the point of needing to network multiple daw camputers together. This can be done with jack fairly easy by using netjack. if you dont have extra machines available. try recoding your midi instruments to a wave file. even many wave files will use less resources on playback than sampled realtime instruments

What i have done is set up 3 machines. instruments and samples split between the two most powerful and the third lesser machine set as the controller and recorder.

[luciorgomes]

Are you running jack2? Ladish seems to work better with it.