HDN jumps to high CPU usage

[propower]

Hey all,

I have a fresh install on OSX 10.8.5, PT 11.0.2, Waves Diamond and thats it.

I am running into an issue where everything is working great in the session (fairly small) and even if I go 64 buffer / 96kHz ProTools cpu usage bounces between 40 and 60% total but cpu as registered in the Activity monitor is about 50% (this is an i7 mini and 800% = full load all cores). Total load including system is 10% or so.

Out of the blue pretty much the protools System usage meters all go to a pretty low value and the Activity monitor shows pro tools at 130% to 150%. Total system load is like 20% and sadly the mini fan goes wild. The session still works fine. I do note that even with the disc playback set to 4G protools has only claimed 500MB of memory. I thought in the previous release if I tagged 4G it took 4G....

Things I have tried-
- Remove thunderbolt monitor from chain (use HDMI monitor) - plug TB interface direct to mini
- Reinstalled everything and ran this with only stock plugins + revibe
- Once in this state changing buffers has no effect
- Stopping Eucon has no effect
- Remove dynamic processing - no effect
- Check uncheck ignore errors - no effect

- Anybody have a clue what this might be???

[propower]

I will have to run for a bunch of hours but I may have found the answer...

FWIW: when the machine got in the state where PT CPU usage was 3 times normal - I could even close the session and it wouldn't recover! So had nothing to do with a session I concluded.

Regardless... I was doing super clean installs to minimize things to solve other issues and followed the Install instructions to the letter. Now I already had my licenses on the ilok so no need to load any new ones - And nowhere does it say "load ilok manager" - so I didn't. Well in combing through all the optimizations on the AVID site I saw "download latest ilok driver". Made me think I didn't install any - but ProTools seemed to know how to find the ilok anyway (I had assumed the drivers were built in now). Well I have downloaded and installed the ilok manager and at least for a couple of hours no high cpu issues.

Fingers crossed - If not this then I am starting to think this may be hardware related on the mini.

Hope this helps someone else some day.