Track Freeze - No Freed Memory

[andrewjohansen]

Thanks for your time guys and girls

When I use track freeze, it doesn't free up the memory until after I restart Pro Tools

I'm running MacOS 12.6.8 and PT 2023.3.0

Anyone have this same issue?

Thanks again for those taking the time to read this and offer some help

-Andrew

[Darryl Ramm]

I am not surprised freezing a track will not necessarily result in less memory use.

Track freeze was designed primarily to free CPU processing overhead and deal with sharing sessions where folks don't have compatible plugins.

I have no idea if the freeze code actually tries to free say plugin memory, I can imagine reasons why that's hard to do and why a developer might want to just leave it alone until the session is closed. As for much of the basic memory needed to support the track, that's still going to need to be all there.

What actual problem are you trying to solve? If you are running out of memory you might be better off adding memory, looking for plugins with memory leaks, changing VIs to use streaming samples in VIs or running VIs in a separate server.

[andrewjohansen]

Thanks for that feedback and insight Darryl!

I'm not necessarily trying to accomplish anything

Rather, I'm trying to just understand the function of track freeze

It definitely clears up CPU usage so I guess that's the expected behavior

Your insights to how it affects memory brings me to some questions that are probably very basic and rudimentary to most PT users:

1. What is the point of memory in a session?

2. Can you still run the session if the memory is maxed out but the CPU readings are low?

3. Is cached memory different than regular memory in the "System Usage" window in Pro Tools?

--

You've been a tremendous help Darryl--I really appreciate it!