general system sluggishness driving me bonkers

[tomcat]

i don't know what changed but I am going nuts. please help. I am cutting and mixing in a pretty large session. about 40 tracks, but 75 minutes long and lots of automation. Only one RTAS plug.
The problem is most times when playback stops, I get the drumming fingers for about 5 seconds or more before I can do anything else. I cannot work at speed at all. I feel like this may be cpu related, as there seem to be cyclic "lockouts" in the finder as well. As if the computer is doing something in the BG.
I have done a clean reinstall of os 9.2.1, PT 5.1.1, fresh format of audio drives, added another 512 megs of ram, set all the os prefs according to digi specs, all with no improvement.
any ideas?

the current system is:
G4 450dp
1 gig ram
mixplus
pt 5.1.1
os 9.2.1
internal ata100 video drive with sony codec
oxford 911 firewire audio drive
hui
stock video card/sgi widescreen

[DigiTechSupt]

Suggestions:
-Trash the DigiSetup File, Pro Tools preference, and DAE prefs (the entire folder) from the System Folder>Preferences folder. Empty the Trash and restart the Mac.

-Disable AppleTalk.

-Disable all Indexing in the Finder.

-Set Energy Saver to "Never"

-Format your ATA and FireWire drives with Apple Drive Setup (disable third party FireWire extensions).

If problems persist:
-Remove the FireWire drive and run PT from the internal ATA.

-Disable the HUI and see if system performance improves.

Brent

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Tomcat wrote "I feel like this may be cpu related, as there seem to be cyclic "lockouts" in the finder as well."

Have you checked if you have a worm? Do these "lockups" happen in even minute increments (every 10, 20 30 minutes)?

Check out http://www.sherpasoft.org.uk/MacViru...autostart.html

Rail

[tomcat]

thanks for the tip. i checked, with worm gobbler. no autostart.

[lagasus]

What are your preferred and minimum memory settings for PT and DAE?

Trying upping the ante (leave minimums at the defaults):

Memory Allocation:
DAE mem min 30,008 ; pref 100,000
PT mem min 35,388 ; pref 160,000

ALSO

Go to the display menu and check "Display Auto-Created Regions" and then go to the audio menu and choose "Select Unused Except Whole Files." Then clear those unused regions.

[tomcat]

my memory is as follows, preferred, of course: dae 80,000, PT 400,000. I know this seems outreageous, but pt was giving me low mem warnings while making big conforms in this session with anything less than 365,000.

I will try the other suggestions, thanks.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Still concerned that you're having these "lockups" in the Finder -- so I'm apt to think it's not Pro Tools specific... I'd check for any other apps or extensions. Is the system checking for a networked drive? Is there some timed activity (virus checker?)??

Other things to check - SCSI cables, ATTO settings, termination. (whoops - ignore that.. you have none of those).

Have you disabled the 2nd processor?

Best of luck.

Rail

[PeeTee]

Aren't you suppose to be using some special DAE that's a CS version if you're using FireWire HDs with PT?

DAE 5.1.1cs1 FireWire Update

[Philthy]

The advice about appletalk is good- you should also turn off TCP/IP if you have it. You don't have to take out the extensions; just open the TCP/IP control panel, set user mode to advanced, hit "options" and set it to inactive.

Of course you'll need to turn it back on to use the internet.

I've seen cyclical pauses exactly as you describe and have been able to immediately cure them by disabling TCP/IP.

As far as speeding up working in a big project-

(Just noticed lagasus suggests this same thing above!)-

-I've also noticed that it helps to remove unused regions from the audio regions window. Sometimes that can make a huge difference for me when there are really a ton of regions, something I can feel right away in terms of response times.

[tomcat]

hey brent, thanks for the reply. Of course the prefs were all trashed as i did a clean reinstall of os and pt.

could you please clarify the finder indexing issue? do you mean find by content? i don't have this extension loaded. is there something else?

and about the drives?!? Apple's drive setup cannot initialize firewire drives, aparently. It sees them but calls them not compatible. I can't seem to find anything to initialize them with other than Disk Cintrol from Indigita software. The bridge chips are from Granite, updated with thier latest firmware.
Can I do something to make apple's drive setup see and initialize these drives??

Thanks.