Protools slows to a craw as session size expands

[feakerboo]

specs:

Mac Studio M1 Ultra 20 core
128RAM
Newest Protools version
MAC OS 13.6.9
Same issue in native thunder bolt or in HDX Hybrid
playback drive is USB-C Samsung solid state.

My current session is about 400MB and is using about 750 voices. I don;t have playback issues so much as I get a 3 second spinning beachball every 10th command or so. I've tried:
thinned automation
run the picture off a satellite machine and disabling the Video engine
cleared unused clips
turned RAM cache on and off


I;m unable to correct this issue which as the session grows always seems to get worse. Any Ideas?

[BScout]

"playback drive is USB-C Samsung solid state."
massive bottleneck

Also make sure you have dynamic plugin processing turned on.

Turn off undo and see what happens. This is a major cause of sluggishness and is related to your first issue of the drive and its speed. As the session grows, it is both trying to read off that drive and write undos. Pro Tools also checks on remaining space on a drive for every track. Add all that up and you get a halting system trying to complete tasks when you are trying to do basic stuff.

[Darryl Ramm]

To exclude storage performance as an issue can you move the session to the Mac Studio internal SSD and test there. That drive is so much much faster that any USB drive you can attach to the Studio.

What exact Samsung SSD drive model? With what controller/dock if it uses one?

The filesystem on that external SSD is APFS?

Folks here report decent performance with even complex sessions coming off USB SSDs, even without lots of disk cache needed, but YMMV and I'd personally prefer to have at least Thunderbolt 3 connected PCIe/NVMe drives or use the internal Mac SSD.

What is disk cache set to? A large disk cache won't stop new content being written to disk but it can help keep more content in memory easing read performance issues.

Also in Activity monitor just check and make sure the system is not running out of memory. No I don't care it has 128GB or more, it takes just one errant plugin to slowly leak over all that memory. And the beachball behavior is a common sign of a memory leak... but you also tend to see the whole systems slow down and misbehave, not sure if that is happening here. In the mac OS Activity Monitor on the memory page look at the memory Pressure Chart... it should be staying green as the system runs.