PT HD 10 physical ram running low?

[garnoil]

I finally installed PT HD 10 and I am starting to use it. I just opened a session that I did on PT 9 and I got a warning:

Physical Ram running low, reduce Disk Cash or install more RAM.

I have 10 gigs of RAM allocated in the Disk Cash play back engine which leaves 4 gigs for the system (I have a total of 14 Gigs or Ram)?

Also my PCI indicator is bouncing up and down like crazy even if the machine is stopped and there is no activity in PT. On the systems indicator the PCI is always jumping at around 60% and the CPU also bounces like crazy from about 20% to about 60% but PT is not playing, it is just parked at the start of the film.

One more thing, it takes PT about 2 minutes to load the session into cash and recalculate wave forms..is this normal?

8 core Mac, SL with 14 Gigs of Ram, PT Hd 2 version 10, Black Magic Intensity resolved to sync HD.

[tamasdragon]

It's not good, because with your setup, you give 4GB of ram to the os and to Pro Tools. That's not enough. Reduce the disk cache size so your os can have at least (minimally) 2GB, and Pro Tools need minimally additional 2 (4 is better), the remaining can go to disk cache.

[Frank Kruse]

+1
10GB is too much.

I have 16GB RAM and assign 6 for disk cache and still sometimes run low on memory.

Frank.

[garnoil]

Thanks so much! I suspected I was doing something wrong, I guess I did not understand Disk Cash and how it works. Thanks for clarifying. I'll try to assign 6 gigs for Disk Cash.

g

[thierryd]

FWIW I just finished a film that I mixed on a PT HD3, Harpertown Mac Pro, OS 10.6.7, PT10.0.1, 8GB RAM, with 4GB allocated to Disk Cache in PT. The session was using 192 voices and about 178 busses, lots of native plug-ins on source tracks and dsp plug-ins on (master)busses and auxes. PCI indicator was rather steady at 50%, CPU indicator bounced between 25 and 60% (but remaining on the lower side). There is no Blackmagic card in this computer (no slots free with HD3 of course), but I also didn't put video online as it would tax the session too much. Video was played on a Video Satellite system. It was a "super" session with 5 reels in it, containing all DIA, MUS and SFX tracks, most of them playing from one source disk (stems went to another disk). The final session was about 12MB (in PT9 and before days, this would probably be around 60MB).
PT warned me a couple of times that automation was too dense and that I could thin it (which I didn't want to and never did).
I also got a few warnings about not enough physical RAM, but it wouldn't stop working.
I did however always have Activity Monitor running, to see how much PT was using. I always took care not to run other large applications. When you are running a while, PT RAM usage might go up (depending on what you do), especially if you do heavy editing of large chunks (i.e. in conform situations). When PT gets to 2GB and above, I would restart the session or the computer. In PT10 this is far less than in PT9, where Memory usage was a much bigger problem.
In the above situation I would have about 800MB free RAM and the timeline could never cache more than 20-25%. More RAM would be better of course. We also have HD2 Westmere Mac Pros with Blackmagic Extreme HD cards and 24GB RAM. We run PT with 16GB Disk cache on those, leaving 8GB to the computer and other stuff.
The Blackmagic cards do take an amount of PCI traffic however and on the HD2 systems we typically see higher PCI percentages in PT (more like 50-60% and jumping, as the OP is seeing).
To the OP: if your CPU indicator is jumping a lot, do you use virtual synths?

Greetings,

Thierry

[garnoil]

No, i do use vi or midi. Just a huge 5 reel sesión similar to what you describe but i do have HD video in it

[Frank Kruse]

I wonder what's really better using a small disk-cache or a large one.
My theory is that unless you have your entire time-line cached fully I think it should be fine to run at 1-2GB. In reality we mostly work within a few minutes segment of a project so why would it help to cache another 50 minutes of the time-line?
On the other hand jumping around a lot in the project will put a lot more strain on the computer because it constantly re-caches when you make a quick jump 30 minutes down the time-line and back again. This only stops when the entire timeline is cached.

I might be totally wrong with this but I keep the cache small since I can´t fully cache everything anyway and when I re-cut I turn it off.

Why would caching 90 minutes of audio when working on a 2 minutes of dialog during the day speed anything up more? IMO, it just eats RAM like crazy.
So for us post-people I´m not really sure if buying 24GB of RAM or even more isn't just a waste of money.
And from my last test lock-times to LTC actually got worse under 10 with disk-cache on.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Frank.

[garnoil]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

I wonder what's really better using a small disk-cache or a large one.
My theory is that unless you have your entire time-line cached fully I think it should be fine to run at 1-2GB. In reality we mostly work within a few minutes segment of a project so why would it help to cache another 50 minutes of the time-line?
On the other hand jumping around a lot in the project will put a lot more strain on the computer because it constantly re-caches when you make a quick jump 30 minutes down the time-line and back again. This only stops when the entire timeline is cached.

I might be totally wrong with this but I keep the cache small since I can´t fully cache everything anyway and when I re-cut I turn it off.

Why would caching 90 minutes of audio when working on a 2 minutes of dialog during the day speed anything up more? IMO, it just eats RAM like crazy.
So for us post-people I´m not really sure if buying 24GB of RAM or even more isn't just a waste of money.
And from my last test lock-times to LTC actually got worse under 10 with disk-cache on.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Frank.

I think you are right, what happens if I have 14 gigs of ram and I cash 2. Does this means that PT accesses 2 gigs (as usual or thereabouts), 2 are used in disk cash, so that is 4 gigs. What happens to the other 10 gigs are they used by the OSx, and if that is the case, I think that is too much for the osx2 (kind of a waste?). I just started using this feature and I am just learning about it but for me, although the system is a bit more responsive, it is not a huge improvement. I think this is because disk cash does not benefit video which I always have in my sessions in HD form (1920X1080) and the Intensity card resolving to HD sync. Is this true? is video un-affected by disk cash?

[Postman]

I put in 24G ram for PT10. After doing several small-medium jobs (40-50 tracks, heavy automation, 60 minutes) fully cached, I've returned cache setting to "normal"! I don't notice any real difference in performance between that and smaller cache settings (2-4G). When set for large cache (12, 16, 24 gigs), I often got pizza wheels right after opening a session, for a couple of minutes until the timeline was 100% cached. Once at 100% things worked okay, but as I said not a noticeable improvement to make it worthwhile.

PT10 overall is already more snappy than PT8 was (I never used PT9) so I'm not sorry about upgrading, but spending for big ram has so far been a waste.

Video-wise I don't have Blackmagic, but I am regularly running QT video in addition to Video Satellite. (I unlink Video Satellite sometimes while editing.) Cache does nothing helpful for either.

[Frank Kruse]

Wanted to add I do think that the cache makes PT snappier when working normally (compared to turning it off) and does all sorts of other cool things like direct playback from a network volume regardless of streaming speed etc.

I just don't see the point of buying 24GB of RAM when I work around the same 2 minute segment during the day. Performancewise there is no difference between the time when I had 6GB and now that I have 16GB.

I still get low memory situations even with 16GB of RAM when only using 2GB of disk-cache but that´s an entirely different issue I think and I doubt that having 24GB of RAM would change that before PT will become a 64bit app. Before that I think the money for another 16GB RAM or even more is better spent somewhere else.

Frank.