2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

Hey all- just got a new 2019 iMac with 8-core i9, was tired of fighting my old machine whose CPU just could not keep up (2010 MBP... I know). When the track freezing feature was introduced that helped some, but it was just taking FOREVER to mix cause the computer just couldn't keep up, even on smaller sessions. I got the most powerful Mac I could afford, only to find that you can't run older versions of OS X than what the computer came with- whoops- so now I have about 13 days to decide to either return the computer (a fairly significant investment as you can imagine), or wade into the muddy waters of making stuff work in Mojave that has yet to be officially supported. I tried opening up a session just to see what would happen, and though everything basically works, I was expecting pretty stellar performance from such a powerful processor, but I'm still getting some clicks/pops/AAE -6101 CPU overload errors. I attached a screenshot of the session I'm running. I am for sure running a decent handful of plugins, but there are not "that" many tracks... I was getting fairly solid performance out of my work's 2015 MBP (which was maybe a quad core i5?) until adding my last few mastering plugins on the 2 buss, so I expected the new machine to be head and shoulders above that in performance, but have not been blown out of the water like I was expecting to be. Based on your guys' experience, what would you expect with a session this size and a computer of those specs?

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

Please upload a sharper picture as this is too blurry to make out what plugins are used on what track etc

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

What interface?
What session sample rate?
What IO buffer size?
What drive is the audio on? (You should be using the internal super fast SSD on this computer, disk issues can exacerbate CPU errors)

Make sure disk cache is enabled=set to a size
Ignore errors is off at least while troubleshooting
Dynamic plugin processing off

What troubleshooting have you done on this new system?
You should of at least already tried...
Trashing prefs
Testing with standard output as the playback engine
Removing all third party plugins
Testing starting with a new empty session
Testing from a newly created admin account
Disabling hyper-threading
Looking for possible denormalization issues (runaway/spiky CPU use of some plugins)

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

Sorry, here's a dropbox link to full res screenshot.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fvvrw812en...%20AM.jpg?dl=0

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

Good questions-

Antelope Orion Studio 2017 connected via Thunderbolt 3-2 adapter (Apple)
96kHz, 1024 buffer size
Running off of external USB 3 HDD (I think 7200rpm?)

Initially I had disk cache set to normal, ignore errors off, dynamic processing on
I'll change those and try again

No real troubleshooting yet to speak of- just surprised that out of the gate, this computer that I was expecting to be fairly powerful (3.6GHz 8-core i9) is having a lot of trouble playing back more than a couple seconds of this session at a time, even after freezing basically all tracks except reverb returns and mix buss.

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

Move your entire session to the internal SSD and disconnect the external boat-anchor.

It takes one bad plugin to trash even the most powerful computer... you don’t even need to have that plugin instantiated in the session, just installed.

Start at “Help us Help You” up the top of each DUC web page. Should take less than an hour to do this basic but very useful troubleshooting.

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

Slate FG-X is quite a CPU hog, and it's possible that some of the other plugins in use have oversampling activated.
Have you tried looking at the system usage meter and deactivating (not bypassing) plugin by plugin?

Do you have any background processes running? A fresh MacOs install has spotlight indexing for quite a while if you have a lot of emails/documents/files in general. Also the scan of photos and face recognition that runs in the background if you have a huge picture library synced from your phone uses up a lot of resources.
Check the activity monitor for CPU usage of your system if there's a process consuming CPU % other than PT. Any process that uses more than 10-15% is worth investigating, if you did not consciously initiate it.

It's certainly not normal behavior for that machine to not be able to handle this session.

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

And looking at your plugins very quickly, lots to want to troubleshoot there, esp. Slate VMR, old Ozone 6, etc. we cannot guess what you are doing in VMR. Try removing all .aaxplugin files, and restarting (Pro Tools will magically reinstall its own default plugins) if that is rock solid, try putting back say VMR and seeing if that works.

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

Thanks for the helpful tips guys, sorry I didn't do a little more due diligence up front. My hope was to just restore my new machine from a backup of my old machine and get back to work without making a big project out of this- how naive! I had been keeping an eye on Activity Monitor, no other significant processes running in background. I trashed prefs, turned off Spotlight indexing, moved session to internal SSD, and moved all 3rd party plugins to unused plugins folder and started to replace. Session was still fairly responsive after adding back Slate and Waves plugs, no CPU overload errors to speak of. Adding Melodyne back, it took a little bit of a hit. Overall it is performing much better without Ozone which I still haven't added back (all I'm doing there is IRC 1 limiter), but there is still an incessant clicking happening the whole time. I know I'm on shaky ground as far as Pro Tools is concerned with Mojave, and Antelope doesn't officially support it yet either, so I'm wondering if the clicking is related to that rather than general performance issues.

My only real point of reference for all of this is my work's 2015 MBP like I said, so I expected the performance of this machine with twice the processor cores to be in another league, but so far that just hasn't seemed to be the case.

Re: 2019 iMac i9 + PT 2018 + Mojave
 

Did you ever actually try to troubleshoot any issues on your old computer? It was your decision to buy a new iMac Pro — why not ask here for advice before doing that? I would have only done that after carefully troubleshooting everything else.

Maybe you should go look again at the old computer and see if you clean up/troubleshoot the software and plugins there if will work OK for you. Maybe consider upgrades to DRAM and disk would have helped there as well.

And forgot earlier: are theses systems fully optimized? Get every last optimization done, however annoying, at least to start with. If you did that before go check again.