Until somebody else with more experience chimes in, i'll kick things off. Unlike other broadcasting softwares, vMox utilizes the GPU, so freeing up the GPU by making sure to disable window style should help. Having a decent workstation grade GPU is also a plus. I have a LIVA micro PC that I will be using for some mobile SD streaming so I too am interested in this thread.

[Editors Note: Please don't disable Aero, it improves performance in vMix]

I'm curious how in the world Aero improves performance in vMix???

I recently purchased a new ASUS ROG Laptop. It is a beast for vMix. When I first started testing it, things weren't working as smoothly as I had hoped. I checked the task manager and windows had a search indexer process running in the background that was using a lot of CPU and disk cycles. I disabled this process and the machine runs much better now. That is the only process I have altered. I'm sure there are others running on the machine that don't offer any benefits to vMix, but they aren't hindering anything at the moment.

Lots of great posts. Thanks. Two points - I will be investing in a better graphics card due to these posts, but secondly, a well tuned operating system can make a huge difference in performance. I can give you an immediate example - day four of festival. Things have been going well. All of a sudden my CPU usage shoots up to 90% from an average of 25 to 50%. The image blurs. This all goes away after a reboot between shows. The problem was caused by some background Windows service or app running. It could have been a resizing of the swap file, Windows trying to update or any number of background services and apps that run. Tweaking the system will end these issues. I have built DAWs for recording studios all over the city I live in. There is an extensive optimization guide for building DAWs Digital Audio Workstations). I'm surprised there is not one for video. The needs are very different, but I am going to post the DAW optimization as a starting point.

Maybe as a group we can then whittle the list down for a specific series of optimizations for vMix. I have no gigs booked for video for the next while, so will test the optimization and report on results.

Here is a fairly comprehensive Windows 7 optimization guide. It will also mostly apply to Win 8 and 10 with a few changes. I have used or run most of these, but unless you are a tech, or have good computer knowledge, you may want to have somebody do this for you. To the poster who said good hardware is better than optimization, I say you need to optimize all systems for this kind of work. The computers work better, last longer, are more stable and just plain are more responsive and better. I was surprised to NOT see a detailed optimization guide for vMix - so here you go. Please, do some of these and test - nothing is irreversible, but not all systems will behave the same, so test as you go.

I have not tried the SSD optimization yet, and use reason when working with services. Again, you are just turning things off. If there is a problem, go back and turn it on.

Good luck....

1. Set your computer's power for high performance
If your computer is set to conserve energy, the CPU may not be running at full speed all of the time. This can have a detrimental effect on your computer's performance. To set your computer's power for high performance:
- Go to: Start>Control Panel>Power Options
- Choose "High Performance"
- Click the "Change plan settings" button.
- Make sure both power options are set to "Never"

2. Disable system sounds
System sounds can interrupt . Ensure that they are disabled by doing the following:
- Go to control panel and select "Sound"
- Go to the sounds tab
- Under sounds scheme, select "No sounds"
- Click "Apply" then, "OK"

3. Enable DMA (Direct memory access) on each IDE channel
This allows data to be transferred directly into the memory and can improve audio performance. To ensure that DMA is enabled:
- Open device manager
- Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers category then double click on each one of the IDE channels
- Under the 'Advanced settings' tab, make sure the 'Enable DMA' box is ticked in device properties
Please note: this only applies to some hardware and if this option is not available, you should not worry about completing this step.

4. Set processor scheduling to "Background services"
This will improve the performance of your audio drivers on your computer. To do this:
- In control panel select "system"
- Go to "Advanced system settings" and then the "Performance" tab
- Set processor scheduling as "Background Services"
- Click "Apply" then "OK"

5. Disable Windows Firewall, anti-virus and spyware software
These should all be disabled to ensure that no interferences occur during audio recording or playback and to ensure that maximum resources are available. To remain secure while your firewall and antivirus disabled, it is advisable to temporarily disconnect from any internet connections when working with audio.

6. Setting Swap File
The new standard is 1.5x RAM. The advantage of setting your own page file as opposed to dynamic OS controlled, is it prevents fragmentation (less read head relocation reducing overall seek time). For best performance you should set it on a quite drive. I other words, an alternate physical drive that doesn’t have a lot of I/O requests. Not your system/boot/application partition and/or not streaming data drive. if you’ve only got the two, I’d leave it on the system partition.

7. Disable advanced power-saving and dynamic performance options for your CPU.
This usually needs to be done in the BIOS or UEFI of your computer and includes Enhanced Intel SpeedStep (EIST), AMD Cool 'n' Quiet, Intel Turbo Boost, and AMD Turbo CORE.

8. Disable C-States in the BIOS/UEFI, if your computer's BIOS/UEFI gives you this option. C-States allow your CPU to sleep when idle, which may interfere with real-time applications such as audio. This option is often called "Disable CPU Idle State for Power Saving" in the BIOS/UEFI.Advanced optimisation:

9. Disable User Account Control (UAC)
1. This helps alleviate and prevent installation and registration issues. To disable UAC, click the start button. In the Search Box type UAC and press ENTER.
2. In the UAC window, slide the slider down to ‘never notify’ and press OK

10. Disable USB Power Management
This helps prevent power issues with devices that are powered by USB.
1. Open Control Panel, then click on Device Manager.
2. Open the Universal Serial Bus Controllers menu.
3. Right click on the USB Root Hub in the menu and choose Properties
4. Go to the Power Management tab and un-check the the box to ‘allow the computer to turn off…’
5. Repeat this for each of the USB Root Hub’s that show up in device manager

11. Enabling Write Cache and Advanced Performance for hard drives
1. This helps alleviate poor hard drive performance. In Device Manager open the Disk Drives menu.
2. For all of your hard drives, right click on the drive name and select Properties
3. Go to the Policies tab and check the boxes to “Enable write caching” and “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing”If you wish to optimise your system further, or you are using a system that is particularly lacking in resources you can follow the tips below for advanced optimisation.

12. Disable Startup Items
1.Click the Windows Start button and in the search box, type msconfig, then press ENTER
2. Go to the Startup Tab and choose ‘disable all’ in the bottom right corner.

13. Indexing Options
Vista/Win7 can automatically index all the files in the Start Menu, user profile folders, and files setup for offline access. Too many files in these locations, especially when the files change often, causes the indexing service to add to the overall CPU load. While this change speeds up your overall performance, it will also adversely affect your searching speed in those locations. However, with a good file-management strategy, this will be irrelevant for the DAW user. To adjust your indexing options, go to Start > type in "indexing options" > press Enter > Modify. In the "Change selected locations" window, uncheck everything except for the Start menu, located in C: > ProgramData > Microsoft > Windows.

14. Speedstep or Processor Throttling (more detail than #8)
This optimization is probably one of the most important out of all of these. Unfortunately due to the vast array of differences in computer manufacturing, we don’t have a specific step by step tutorial on how to do this. This setting can be disabled from your computers BIOS. If you are familiar with your computers BIOS, look for “Intel Speedstep”, EIST, or “AMD Cool n’ Quiet”, and disable it. This is basically a setting that ramps down your CPU clock cycles to a slower speed, to save electricity. In many cases it interferes heavily with most recording processes on a computer and can severely degrade your performance. Disabling this setting will also make all of your other programs perform a lot faster as well. If you aren’t sure how to disable this option, get with your computer manufacturer for instructions on how to do this.

Windows Services
One way in which you can make more resources available to improve performance, is to disable unnecessary Windows 7 services as these use valuable resources. The following site has a comprehensive guide to the services running on Windows 7 and helps locate the services that are safe to disable:
http://www.blackviper.co...-service-configurations/

10 tips for optimizing SSD drives
http://www.disk-partitio...mization-windows7-1.html
Worth a look...

On swap file - a friend suggested the following - install a USB 3 64 GB memory stick inside the computer and permanently mount it under the case. Then set this as my swap file drive. It removes the swap file from any other drives and will be lightning fast.

Good point. Going to discuss this further. Thanks for the reply.

The PCie link management solution to my problem came from Blackmagic themselves - and worked. I could not get more than 5 DeckLink channels running on my A99 / i7 2011v3 / 40 Lane 4Ghz CPU (so i don't have a general performance issue). Interesting that its ON by default in windows 7 high performance profile, but OFF by deafut in Windows 10 high performance profile.

My system is Capturing 8 channels, and playing out 2 (2 x DeckLink Quads and a Decklink Duo)

I just checked my Windows 10 computer and it does nave PCIe link management set to OFF. However, checking my vMix unit running Win 7 with a high performance profile, the PCIe link management is also set to OFF. I didn't change it since this setting is new to me.

Good info there, albeit riddled with grammar and spelling errors ;-) I do think SSDs are designed with a longer lifespan than traditional flash media however, so users using a SSD are not as likely to have an issue as those using regular flash media aka thumbdrives. If you want to be more secure I would set up your drives in a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array, but then since usb drives use USB controllers and not dedicated controllers you run into the 7th level of hell where you try to build a stable stripe array using software driven RAID... At that point you might as well just get some cheap traditional magnetic 250g SATA III drives and run them in RAID 10 (0+1), then you get the best of all worlds, Just be prepared for the added noise 4+ high speed drives can make.