Pro Tools stuttering scrolling on Mac Pro

[firebass305]

I just purchased a 6-core 3.33 GHz Mac Pro about two weeks ago and I'm running Pro Tools 9 and having a bizarre scrolling issue - for instance:

Say I were to click and drag the cursor from the back to the front of a session to highlight all of the audio for, say, a consolidation - right when I slide my mouse to the left everything slows to a crawl and Pro Tools gets all jerky as it seemingly struggles to highlight from the back to front of a session. The spinning beach ball of death also appears and disappears multiple times.

I have a 2.4 GHz 13" MacBook Pro and a 2.4 GHz 13" MacBook (white) that perform this task without a hitch.

For whatever reason it seems as though in most cases the MacBook and MacBook Pro perform weird little tasks like that far smoother than my brand new Mac Pro. I've been able to replicate this on a friend's Mac Pro as well, and I recently saw (and responded to) a post in the M-powered section about a similar issue with Pro Tools 8 on a newer Mac Pro.

Almost everything else works perfectly and VERY speedily, however whenever I highlight a large piece of the screen I get stuttering highlighting and intermittent spinning beach balls.

Does anyone have an idea of what this may be? I'm sure I'm not the only one experiencing weird slowness on a computer that is a powerhouse. (And yes, I've tried different buffer settings and no, dynamic transport is not enabled.)

[Park Seward]

I have the same computer and I haven't seen those problems.

Have you tried the basic troubleshooting tricks like repairing permissions and trashing prefs?

[firebass305]

Hey Park - thanks for the reply. Took me a while to get back around here.

I actually did do all those troubleshooting tricks. It happens sporadically with certain sessions, whether new or imported from another machine. I'm trying to lock down a pattern and I'm having trouble doing so.

After the scrolling gets trippy, usually other low-level tasks like region healing or batch fading brings up the spinning beach ball. It eventually recovers.
It will do this whether or not the transport is playing the session. Strange that you aren't having this problem, as there are others with this machine and other Mac Pros that see this issue occasionally.

Gotta figure this out. . . it's annoying.