[rwbreck]

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.