I had kind of given up on the complex control scheme / complex routings in Live and Bitwig; when I tried that seriously ~2 years ago, it was so klunky, I couldn't get it to work smoothly in a way that wasn't a nightmare for me.
-- nickgreenberg
Yeah, Live is a bit of a resource hog. I never have significant issues running it, though...but the machine it resides on is a bit "non-standard". It's an H-P Z620 with dual 8-core Xeons @ 2.6 GHz, 32 GB RAM.
The rationale behind using this sort of platform revolves SOLELY around thruput. Having seen how other platforms with less cores (but more speed) deal with Live 10 and upwards, I opted to get a machine that had as many cores as I could get within a certain budgetary constraint...and I found these refurbed on Newegg and knew that if the parallel processing didn't bog the machine down (which I didn't expect to happen), this would BLOW SMOKE. And sure enough, it does. I can still crash it, but it takes a project with LOADS of tracks, well over 50-60 active plugins, and a ton of automation lanes to get it to choke. VSTs that are extremely processor-intensive can be a problem as well...such as with Arturia's Sound Easel emulation, but these sorts of VSTs will bottom-out pretty much ANY machine unless it's a real screamer.
Upshot is that if you can get buttloads of processor cores, Live purrs like a kitten. And that Z620 is what was referred to as a "virtualization workstation", which is not quite like a regular PC, but is a machine that was optimized for VR emulation...which ALSO requires tons of thruput. The choice was kinda obvious.