CPU -9173 Error [Solved potentially]

[teedeecee]

Hi folks,

Like many of you, I have been plagued with this pesky -9173 error. Reading those afflicted, I too thought my machine had plenty of CPU cycles left for audio usage.

For the past few weeks, I have been locked in on a session from around 5am-10pm each day so I had a good repeatable project and environment to perform some tests, and so resolved to try and find what this issue was related to. The good news is that I may have found the issue.

Using Terminal.app, Console.app, iStats Menus and Activity Monitor.app to monitor what the system has been doing, I started to see some patterns. After doing all the reinstalling of PT, removing and reinstating plugins, trying difference drives, trying different audio i/o, it appears that the very helpful app called Flux.app is the culprit.

Flux.app is a simple utility that changes the colour temperature of your monitor to mirror the time of day. So early the morning and into the evening the monitor progressively gets orange. Its a brilliant way of reducing fatigue and makes long sessions a little less onerous. However, it seems that its making Sysem calls to the WindowServer, and when it does this there must be an OS X API snafu as the system locks for a moment, and the poor old AAE chokes and then reports this error.

This explained why I was seeing more -9173 errors in the early mornings and evenings. Once identified, this -9173 error correlated directly with the "WindowServer" entry in the console.app. The remedy, was to simply delete Flux.app, restart, and get back to mixing.

I was sad to lose the automatic orange colour temperature, but this is easily reproduced by creating a custom monitor calibration in the Display pane of the Preferences.app

Whilst I am sure there are a multitude of reasons why the AAE could choke and report the -9173 error, for me, I have managed to completely remove the non-session caused ones.

Hope this helps some of you.

Best,

Tony

[dankin]

This got my hopes up for a second...but I don't have a flux.app on my mac to delete. I assume this is a 3rd party app you were using?

[diogo_c]

I'll try to see if I can find a pattern. I use Flux, hard to live without it, and yes I got a ton of 9173s and 6101 as well...

[teedeecee]

Originally Posted by diogo_c

I'll try to see if I can find a pattern. I use Flux, hard to live without it, and yes I got a ton of 9173s and 6101 as well...

You can use Apple's Monitor calibration tool to create a profile that has the same colour temperature as Flux.app