10.3.10 unstable

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by Giftofsound

With 32 gigs of RAM I am also experiencing "memory-like" crashes with PT10.3.10 HD .

Practically speaking, PT 10.3.10 and earlier can only use 2.5 GB of RAM. Beyond that, PT becomes unstable and memory issues will occur. This is not affected by how much RAM you have installed. While 32 GB of RAM is great for other reasons, PT can only utilize up to 4 GB in theory and 2.5 GB in practice.

PT 11.0.0 and later will be able to access as much RAM as you have available.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Chief Technician

Practically speaking, PT 10.3.10 and earlier can only use 2.5 GB of RAM. Beyond that, PT becomes unstable and memory issues will occur. This is not affected by how much RAM you have installed. While 32 GB of RAM is great for other reasons, PT can only utilize up to 4 GB in theory and 2.5 GB in practice.

PT 11.0.0 and later will be able to access as much RAM as you have available.

Are you talking about in Windows or OSX? I can see it in Windows but not OSX.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Are you talking about in Windows or OSX?

OSX.

Originally Posted by musicman691

I can see it in Windows but not OSX.

Can see what? This limitation? If you use OSX, launch Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/) while Pro Tools v10.3.10 or earlier is active. In the Kind column, it will say Intel. Note that 64 bit applications are listed as Intel (64 bit).

[Giftofsound]

How do I prevent these issues then? Should I set memory cache to 4GB maximum?

That seems awfully low , especially with feature film mixes where at least 5-10 gigs is needed to cache the session.

When allocating a full mix session ram it seems to cache correctly in the system usage window.

Do you think this is causing memory related crashes?

[Chief Technician]

The Disk Cache (kmmserver in Activity Monitor) is a separate process from Pro Tools. If the System Usage window shows that your Timeline Cached meter is 100% and your Disk Cache meter is less than 100%, then the Disk Cache setting is not the problem.

If you want the Pro Tools application to use less memory, then run as many plug-ins as you can as DSP plug-ins and set all unused tracks to inactive. If you are using virtual instruments, and those instruments can use an external memory server (i.e. Native Instruments), turn that function on, as it will reduce how much memory is used by the virtual instrument within Pro Tools.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Chief Technician

OSX.



Can see what? This limitation? If you use OSX, launch Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/) while Pro Tools v10.3.10 or earlier is active. In the Kind column, it will say Intel. Note that 64 bit applications are listed as Intel (64 bit).

Can't see the limitation. In my OSX 10.8.5 boot partition I opened a simple session with 1 instrument track and Omnisphere with it's base sound. In PT 10.3.1 in the real memory column for memory size it showed 832 meg and in PT11 it showed 470 meg for that same session.

Where exactly am I supposed to be seeing this limitation?

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Where exactly am I supposed to be seeing this limitation?

You will not explicitly see the limitation in Activity Monitor. You will be able to make two observations.

1. If you load enough VIs, plug-ins, or tracks in a Pro Tools session, eventually you will approach 2.5 GB of RAM usage in Activity Monitor.
2. As you go past 2.5 GB of RAM usage for Pro Tools v10.x or earlier, you may encounter errors when trying to save sessions, activate or deactivate tracks, etc. These are the symptoms or memory issues.

[Zep Dude]

There's definitely something up with 10.3.10. I've been mixing a song with 10.3.9 with no problem. Did a clean install of 10.3.10 (deleted prefs so everything was fresh) and Pro Tools kept crashing just as the song finished loading. As soon as I went back to 10.3.9 the song loaded fine. The song uses about 1gig of Real Mem according to Activity Monitor and is not pushing any of the usage limits (no VI's, CPU Native 5%, PCI 25%)

I didn't have time to load without 3rd party plugs (perhaps can try that when I have a moment), but with all those same plugs 10.3.9 works fine. All of my plugs are compatible versions and no cracks.

In short: Same song, stable with 10.3.9, crashing with 10.3.10.

My specs:
TDM with 4 Accel cards
OSX 10.6.8 (all optimizations done)
Lynx Aurora 16vt PTHD interface