Allocate more memory to Pro Tools

[aboriginal]

Originally Posted by TOM@METRO

Among other situations, this error can come up when VIs (or other things) are looking for more RAM than can be accessed. I have also seen this when Xpand2 has content loaded in more than one place or on 2 different drives. Be sure to delete all PT preferences when this happens.

Are you really running only 3GB of RAM?

Thanks for the reply Tom. Actually no, I have 6GB of ram and according to the Task Manager, Win 7 was using only around 2.7 GB of it at the time of the crash.

[TOM@METRO]

Have you run a utility to check your RAM?

[Bill Denton]

I am thinking that perhaps your sample libraries should be installed on your audio drive ...

Absolutely NOT!

If you don't have a separate drive for samples, they should be installed on your system drive.

Relative to Pro Tools, the only thing that should be on your audio (session) drive is sessions...

[aboriginal]

Originally Posted by TOM@METRO

Have you run a utility to check your RAM?

I haven't done that in a couple of months. I'll try that again when I get home, but I don't think that's my problem. At least I hope not..

[aboriginal]

Just a quick reply on this. My memory is fine. I have no idea why this is occurring. My audio drive (Velociraptor) is brand new, so I have no idea why this happens. It seems to occur with continuous playback. Meaning, when I'm continuously editing my session and playing it back. I would say between 2 and 3 hours of this is when these access violation errors occur for me. I'll reboot, go back into the session and another 2 or 3 hours later, the error returns! I thought it was a midi issue when I was tracking in the beginning stages, as there are clicks and pops during playback of midi notes. (that's another story) But I'm mixing now, so it's all audio, no VIs running.

Interestingly, I could leave the session open, overnight (8 hours), and it will still be fine when I get back. It's only when I'm actively editing and playing back does this issue occur.

I've also seen that after I've rebooted my machine, some of my preferences are returned to default. For ex. there is no "recent open sessions" option when I re-launch Protools. Or the I/O output names go back to default names. Luckily, it hasn't caused me major pains since I've been able to get my session back through the auto backups. However, I usually have to open the backup previous to the very latest one. The latest backup usually wont open and gives me a runtime protools.exe error; I guess it gets corrupted.

This auto-save issue needs to be addressed. I see that I'm not the only one. This has never happened to me in previous versions of PT. I would disable it, but I'm afraid that something else would go wrong and I wont have a backup to revert to. Frustrating. I hope this new update will resolve these issues.

Anyone else had issue but was able to resolve it?

Thanks

[DigiTechSupt]

You're hitting up against the maximum RAM limitation in a 32 bit system. You can try unloading some plug-ins or removing unused regions, which will usually let you save the session.

There's not much more to be done on this until Pro Tools goes 64 bit.

[albee1952]

Back to the OP, there must be something set wrong somewhere. I have no problem having PT9 access over 3GB of RAM Looking at the Sandra, I would start by pulling the 3 1GB RAM sticks and test. Next, whatever this is(AZKBAVI KXIRGLEZ8 (SCSI, BD-R, HD-DVD-R, DVD+-R-DL, CD-R) : N/A (Q:)) can you remove it for testing? Then thisSONY DVD RW DW-U10A (RAID, DVD+-RW, CD-RW) : N/A (R:)), if RAID is turned on in BIOS, I would turn it off(disabled) and test. Since you have a TI firewire card, I would also disable the Asus firewire(at least until you get things working better). And Pro Tools should be installed on the C: drive, along with all plugins. Samples, as said, should go on their own drive(not a partition of either system or recording) or just install on C: BTW, with 6GB of RAM, you can likely set the paging file to none or off.

[aboriginal]

Thanks Albee for you reply, but it looks like your mixing up the specs of my machine and MSAT's machine. Take another look.

I do have 6 sticks of ram at 1GB each but pulling 3 sticks is not an option for me. I have a dual quad core machine. Each processor gets 3 sticks. Removing 3 will severely degrade pc performance. I do not have a firewire port on the motherboard.

It looks like everything else you mentioned was for MSAT, the original poster.

DTS,

I'll try removing a plugin or two to save the next time this happens. But I was able to get at least 1.7 GB out of PT8 before it started to go crazy and this goes crazy when I'm at 1GB. Something's not right.

Thanks

[DigiTechSupt]

Originally Posted by aboriginal

Thanks Albee for you reply, but it looks like your mixing up the specs of my machine and MSAT's machine. Take another look.

I do have 6 sticks of ram at 1GB each but pulling 3 sticks is not an option for me. I have a dual quad core machine. Each processor gets 3 sticks. Removing 3 will severely degrade pc performance. I do not have a firewire port on the motherboard.

It looks like everything else you mentioned was for MSAT, the original poster.

DTS,

I'll try removing a plugin or two to save the next time this happens. But I was able to get at least 1.7 GB out of PT8 before it started to go crazy and this goes crazy when I'm at 1GB. Something's not right.

Thanks

That sounds more like a bad RAM problem. You will need to pull and swap sticks to see if you can determine if you have any bad RAM modules.

You can also go to 'About This Mac' then click on 'More Info' and select 'Memory' in the left hand panel. Next to each DIMM will be a 'Status' column - does it show 'OK' or are there errors indicated?

[AlainZagar]

I agree with the suggestions re. putting in new/better/different memory or if you haven't tried it then then run full diagnostics on the memory while you monitor internal temperatures. Sound's like a heat problem with marginal RAM to boot.

You can keep HWMonitor up and running during your session and see if the temps start to creep up.

Also noticed that one of the Sandra reports shows a Western Digital WD1002FAEX drive. I had problems with this particular model drive and had to yank it out of the machine because it would spin down at random times and it took a long time to spin back up. I couldn't find anyway to stop it from spinning down. Even disabled the power management on the drive.

Didn't want to give up on it so easily so I stuck it into an external e-sata drive bay and there I could actually hear it spinning down just before the session crashed. I wouldn't recommend this drive for anything other than backup storage.

Alain