Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

Coming from a rock solid (for the most part) PT 10 HD rig on Snow Leopard, so far I am not impressed with how finicky Ultimate is. Sometimes it's just a little laggy feeling, like my cursor isn't keeping up with my mouse. Other times it's 9093 errors with an embarrassingly small amount of plugins in place.

Mac Pro 5,1 3.46 12 core
SSD system drive
7200 1tb session drives
HD Native card
HD IO
Dual Slate Raven, but half the time we don't even have the Raven software running when this is happening


What is the ideal way to set up recording playback engine vs mixing engine? None of the tricks I used to use for 10 seem to work.

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

Ultimate and even later versions of OSX run quite a bit differently to HD10 and Snow Leopard. What versions are you running now? And how much ram does your system have? Upping the ram to 64gig in my old 5,1 Mac Pro made a huge difference in response and snappiness.

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

I'm running a virtually identical computer with an HDX card with the specs in my sig. For the most part it's the first system since PT10 that works "almost" as smoothly.

I don't do any recording on this system but I always max out the hardware buffer to 1024. The other tip is to use the Disk Playback Cache Size as intended. Max sure you have plenty of physical RAM and I set the Cache Size at 10GB. It should be reading in the green in the System Usage window after one pass through the session.

The screenshot I have attached is a moderately sized session playing back and the Mac Pro is barely registering on the CPU and Disk meters.

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

I recently discovered this video, and it's helped me understand some of my issues. Similar machine to you, but likely not the same

CPU vs Real-Time Performance in DAWs

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

What OSX version are you running?
Video card? If you're running Mojave you need a Metal compatible card and the stock card in a 5,1 doesn't support Metal.
How much ram?
Any wireless other than mouse/keyboard?
Is your system ssd on a pcie card or in one of the drive bays?
There's only one buffer to set in PT now unlike in PT 10 - the record buffer.

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

All great points. The Video card may be the issue even it you're still on High Sierra. The stock Mac Pro 5,1 video card was getting really laggy for me from Pro Tools 11 on. I replaced mine long before I went to Mojave.

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

And even beyond that, I had a lot of weird power consumption related issues with my 5,1 Mac Pro. The responsiveness of my apple wireless mouse was the first thing to go. One of the solutions was to unload all of the USB peripherals I had onto a decent TP-link powered USB hub.

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

First time I hear about this. I have a 4,1 live rig and never had a problem with power... maybe they have done something between 4,1 and 5,1 design?

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

No USB power issues here on my 5,1. I run two iloks on the front port. An Akai MPK mini, my data cable to the battery backup and an Apple Cinema display on the three in the rear. Off the Apple Display, A Blue Snow Ball (for video conferencing), a Kensington Trackball and an EditorKeys backlit keyboard.

On the PCI internal bus, I've got the HDX card, a UAD Octo card, an SSD on a PCIe card and a 7970 GPU that takes two power cords. Three of the 4 bays have standard drives in them in addition to the SSD on the PCIe card.

I also have 3.46GHz 12 core CPUs, so I'm beating on the power supply pretty hard.

I did have the power supply go out about a year ago and I replaced it with a rebuilt one. No issues since. The symptoms of that are having to press the start button multiple times when turning the computer on then finally it won't start at all. I still have the old one and will repair it for a spare. It's a common problem with these 10 year old power supplies. There are a couple of know solders that break loose.

Re: Fine tuning my Ultimate rig. Little help, please.
 

And let's not forget about the dust bunnies that can collect inside a cheesegrater and clog up the airways.