PT8 on new Mac Pro very sluggish

[evanbenjamin]

I have a new shiny 2x2.26 Mac Pro with PT 8.0 cs3. OS is 10.5.6. I am working off all SATA drives.

All this tells me my workflow should be quick and responsive. Instead, what I get is a very sluggish response to any command. There is especially a moments hesitation in response to a zoom in or out command. Those fractions of a second add up over the course of a day in to a pretty frustrating experience.

I am working to a QT vid, and I have checked my sound preferences. I have trashed prefs (many times) and run disk utility.

Session is 23.98/48K, about 50 tracks plus auxes. This is an HD3 system , and system usage shows 6 slots empty, and a PCI activity of 41% and CPU of 7%.

I have been playing with DAE playback buffer sizes. It seems the higher number sizes are somewhat more responsive, which is contrary to what the dialogue box offers for advice. Maybe I'm imagining it anyway.

If any of you can tell me this is something happening to you as well, it will save me the hours I spend tweaking and I'll get back to my painful work flow. But if there are any ideas out there, I'd love to hear them. It would be great to know something is set wrong, rather than have to wait until it gets fixed.

-Evan Benjamin

[BradLyons]

I have the previous 8-core Mac w/an HD3 Accel PCIX in a Magma chassis. I have had zero performance issues, however lately I've been working with a session that the QT movie is sluggish----I've heard that from others. As to the system itself, how much RAM do you have? You might also want to drop your RTAS processors down by 1, that can make a difference too. That PCI bus bandwidth sounds high for that few track counts. I regularly work with track counts far greater at the same sample-rate and maybe hit 30% tops.

[evanbenjamin]

I have my RTAS set to 15, and I have 6 gigs of ram, which is the stock amount. I was under the impression that more was not necessary.

PCI bandwidth...well what could be getting my number of higher than normal?

I use a few instances of TL Space, and I know it has a PCI throttle, which I've set for slowest loading, as that will stop a session in it's tracks. But if I disable the TLs, nothing happens to that PCI bar indicator.

-Evan

[BradLyons]

Try disabling the processors to 8, see what happens.

[evanbenjamin]

That is a good thought, but I tried it and there was no change.

It seems to take a second just to switch tools sometimes. And it is not consistent.

-Evan

[kptkarl]

I had one of our systems acting VERY sluggish similar to what you are experiencing. I tried all the usual troubleshooting ways and ended up doing a clean uninstall/reinstall of PT8 and it was back to normal. Don't know if that will do it for yourself but its a fairly painless thing to try. I just copied the Plug-in settings/Plug-ins/IO setups to a folder on the desktop and then after the reinstall copied them back and was up and running smoothly.

[nod25]

Originally Posted by BradLyons

Try disabling the processors to 8, see what happens.

Huh? He has 2 x 2.26...

[formfunction]

Originally Posted by evanbenjamin

That is a good thought, but I tried it and there was no change.

It seems to take a second just to switch tools sometimes. And it is not consistent.

-Evan

does it behave this way when you have no QT vid running?

[BradLyons]

Originally Posted by nod25

Huh? He has 2 x 2.26...

Uhhhhhh yeah, I'm stupid! :) Okay, this computer is a QuadCore that actually performs like an 8-core.....so dropping it down to 7-cores would be ideal. However, I'm not sure if it reads as a 4-core or as an 8-core within the computer. If you show it as 8-cores, drop it to 7-cores. If you show it as 4-cores, then drop it to 3-cores. I have an 8-core, had some issues, dropped it to 7-cores and magnificento!

[evanbenjamin]

Thanks for all the input.

I did delete my video track AND the file from the session. No change.

I show 16 processors in hardware setup and have tried 15 and 7 so far.

I would like to ask kptkarl: was this problem you had with a Mac Pro PT 8 combo? Because until about a month ago I was using a G5 with PT 8 and was very happy.

Uninstall/reinstall is a PITA, but fine with me if it fixes things. Can you tell me some of the symptoms you had? Was it slow to zoom in/out, slow to play sometimes, not always?

-Evan