Interesting performance issue while mixing in Studio One

[Xcaliber]

Last night I downloaded some stems from a website that were made available expressly for the purpose of using them to learn mixing. It's the largest song/most tracks I've imported into Studio One and worked with so far and while the CPU and memory on my laptop were ok (for now) the "Disc performance" within S1 was concerning. As I played back the tracks and messed around with EQ and compression the "Disc" indicator within the performance section of S1's monitoring area kept going from 0% to 100% and then back down. It kept doing that the whole time I worked on the track, up and then back down, up and then back down, over and over. I also had some moments of silence (a second or two) and some "crackle" at times. I'm guessing the tracks were loaded into memory, but maybe I was hitting some kind of buffer issue and it was using the disc to read/write as it was playing back? I was not recording anything, just playing back tracks and adding/changing values in plug-ins. I also wasn't using more than 2 plug-ins (total) because I was working on mixing the first track.

Any ideas on what could be happening?

 

[polarity]

Could have been running out of memory and then using the pagefile (hard drive) as extra memory. Obviously that is much slower and it would increase your disk I/O.

Otherwise I'm not certain. If you want to link to the tracks I can load it up in mine tonight and see if I have any problems.

 

[Steenamaroo]

Yup.
Either the tracks are loaded into memory and you're paging, or the tracks are being called from the (5400rpm?) drive and it's bottle-necking.

Is it the MBP in your sig? 4gb ram is not a lot.