UI freeze every minute.

[IO Composer]

Hi.

I'm having a peculiar issue. This has been going on since upgrading to a new system 3 months ago. It's not a show stopper by any stretch, but I'd love to put it to rest as it is an annoyance. Hopefully someone here has experienced this and figured out what the heck is causing it.

Essentially, I get a UI freeze every minute, on the minute. All day long, like clockwork, the UI freezes for about a second and then everything will run fine for 59 seconds... then hiccup. Meters freeze, scrolling freezes, timecode display freezes, etc. Playback does not, sync is never lost, etc. In fact, in every other capacity, it is by far the most stable PT experience I've ever had in 16 years. It seems to be only related to graphics. I'm sure there's some sort of polling thing going on with my system, but I am having the darnedest time tracking it down.

Any ideas? Perhaps there is a way to determine what the system is doing that would cause this? I've watched Activity monitor very carefully for hours but it does not reveal a source.

Mac OSX 10.6.6
Westmere 6core 3.33Ghz 16Gb RAM/OWC SSDs
PTHD 9.0.0 HD3, dual 192s.
All current plugs, no RTAS instruments (other than the Digi stock)
Bluetooth is off, Wifi is off, all Digi recommended optimizations are off... no spotlight indexing, no timemachine, etc. Totally clean system.

Thanks,
Jamey

[ProTooler]

Could this be an issue with auto save?

[IO Composer]

Thanks, but I don't think so; I've got auto-save set to every 10 minutes.

[IO Composer]

I can't believe no one else is experiencing this. I've got the issue on BOTH of my HD systems. Anyone?

[the dude]

it goes much much deeper than looking at the activity monitor

[reichman]

Jamey: Great rig. Congratulations. Are there any network drives mounted? Especially iDisks. I've seen similar behavior with mounted iDisks.

[IO Composer]

Hi reichman.

Yes, it definitely has something to do with the network, though I'm not sure if it's iDisk related. If I sign out of mobileme, it still happens, but if I disconnect the ethernet cable, it stops.

I wish I could figure out exactly what is causing this because I cannot run my systems without being on the network.

[drenkrom]

Have you tried removing your network interface from the list in the Network system preference pane and creating a new one? I once cured a similar problem that way. Also, MacPro's have two ethernet ports. Does This behaviour happen in both of them?

You could install a network-monitoring utility, such as LittleSnitch (http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html) to find the cause of the problem. It will alert you whenever there is traffic on your ethernet port, tell you what application it comes from, where it's going and let you block it or allow it. That could help identify exactly where the problem is coming from.

The problem is, once you've found the culprit, the app becomes a nuisance and is a pain in the @$$ to uninstall completely. On my scales, that still weighs less than the GUI freezing every minute.

IHTH

[IO Composer]

Drenkom,

Thank you. Deleting my network setting and recreating with a manual IP address resolved the issue.

Very grateful that you took the time to post that. Thank you. Thank you!!!

-Jamey

[SessionKat]

Originally Posted by drenkrom

Have you tried removing your network interface from the list in the Network system preference pane and creating a new one? I once cured a similar problem that way. Also, MacPro's have two ethernet ports. Does This behaviour happen in both of them?

You could install a network-monitoring utility, such as LittleSnitch (http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html) to find the cause of the problem. It will alert you whenever there is traffic on your ethernet port, tell you what application it comes from, where it's going and let you block it or allow it. That could help identify exactly where the problem is coming from.

The problem is, once you've found the culprit, the app becomes a nuisance and is a pain in the @$$ to uninstall completely. On my scales, that still weighs less than the GUI freezing every minute.

IHTH

Outstanding sleuthing and sharing. Thank you.

-tv