Usage 900% - M1 Mac Mini + Pro Tools 2021.10

[trvyf]

Recently I've had Pro Tools spiking system usage & telling me I don't have enough ram to work very stripped down sessions. The most extreme case was hitting pause on the session and watching the system usage gradually climb to 900 percent and the computer forcing me to quit PT.

The problem just started a couple weeks ago. Anyone else had anything like this start happening?

Running a new Mac Mini with 8gb ram.
I also have an older 2012 MacBook Pro (8gb ram) that still runs 2021.7 that has no problems running these sessions.

[JFreak]

Hi, welcome to the community.

I am afraid 8GB is too little for PT to run smoothly. Do you happen to be running macOS Monterey perhaps? It has severe memory leak problem.

Please take a look at the Help Us Help You page that is linked to the forum header.

[trvyf]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Hi, welcome to the community.

I am afraid 8GB is too little for PT to run smoothly. Do you happen to be running macOS Monterey perhaps? It has severe memory leak problem.

Please take a look at the Help Us Help You page that is linked to the forum header.

Thank you for the reply.

I guess I missed the requirement to 16gb. SMH. I assumed because it was working fine on my laptop for so long that 8gb would be fine. It still works very well I just tend to find on the M1 it spikes super hard sometimes.

I am using Big Sur on the Mac mini.

[Emi]

I'm running a Mac mini m1 with 16gb of ram and pro tools 2021.10 and is a beast.

I had to revert back from Monterey to Big Sur. My Mac mini was having sudden crashes so Monterey is not yet prepared for audio work yet. Once I reverted back to Big Sur everything was working smooth.

[ToxicGandhi]

Hi, I recently got a good geal on the same configuration so I went ahead just to get a feel for a M1 system. Latest PT running smoothly with 8gb of RAM, a potential problem arises when you enable video, because Avid Video Engine gobbles 3-4gb of memory just by being enabled, which in my case is about twice as much as PT itself. The memory pressure goes into orange and PT starts asking for more RAM to be installed, but that's about it - I haven't noticed any degraded performance due to this limitation and that's with me having multiple programs opened and multitasking just to see how it responds.

Nonetheless the memory pressure from AVE winds me up, so I am presently testing Video Sync from Non-lethal Applications, which is pretty much smooth sailing, not to mention the small memory footprint compared to AVE.


CPU-power-wise I have no complaints whatsoever, the computer is sitting on my desk next to me completely silent regardless of the session size or computational tasks, be it power-hungry plugins, RXing or video transcodes, CPU temperature rarely goes above 50 degrees even under load, the machine is lukewarm to touch at best.

[huzzam]

Originally Posted by trvyf

Recently I've had Pro Tools spiking system usage & telling me I don't have enough ram to work very stripped down sessions. The most extreme case was hitting pause on the session and watching the system usage gradually climb to 900 percent and the computer forcing me to quit PT.

The problem just started a couple weeks ago. Anyone else had anything like this start happening?

Running a new Mac Mini with 8gb ram.
I also have an older 2012 MacBook Pro (8gb ram) that still runs 2021.7 that has no problems running these sessions.

Despite the stated requirement for 16gb ram, you should be able to get work done on 8, especially as you say in "stripped down" sessions. Try these:
1. disable the video engine if you have it enabled
2. raise your buffer size in the hardware engine, eg to 1024
3. quit other applications
4. remove all non-essential plugins from your plugin folder (especially anything kinda old or out of date)

[Obsidian Dragon]

Originally Posted by trvyf

The most extreme case was hitting pause on the session and watching the system usage gradually climb to 900 percent .

Am I the only one that is impressed that the M1 can run up to 9 times 100% of system usage.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Obsidian Dragon

Am I the only one that is impressed that the M1 can run up to 9 times 100% of system usage.

No. It has 4+4 cores so maxumum would be 800% so there must be some kind of a reporting problem somewhere.