PT session load time affected by what computer parts?

[kirkbross]

Geek question, but what component/s of a computer has / have the greatest effect on load time of a large Pro Tools session?

I fully realize that session load time is first and foremost directly related to the number of plugins, sample libraries, etc. in the session. Given that, I have the latest Mac Mini with the 6 core i7 and 32GB RAM and some of my large sessions take more than a full minute to load. Not the end of the world, but I am curious, purely from a geekery standpoint, if you could build an imaginary computer, which of the below would have the greatest impact on session load time?

1) striping the OS across a dozens of SSDs in RAID 0
2) striping all your audio and libraries across dozens of SSDs in RAID 0
3) having ten billion gigs of RAM
4) having ten billion 4GHz cores at your disposal

[hakofred]

After i changed to a 1 terrabyte SSD harddisk, and dobbeled the ram, everything speeded significant up on my system!
I also use a extern SSD disk for the sessions and projects

[BScout]

Seems more of a thought exercise.

If given an adequate system, then it will be #2 (though you don't have to go that far -- you can saturate TB3 and/or PCIe bandwidth/lane limits with 4 NVMe drives and a good controller without even doing something stupid like RAID 0 but a more sensible RAID 5)

I say "adequate system" because if your cpu is poor or your RAM very limited, then you have other bottlenecks. Which is why I see this as a thought exercise.

"Excess RAM" can help after opening but not really during opening.
High clock CPU can help load times but lots of cores, not really. It's mostly a serial process so those other cores aren't helping.
Striping an OS over a RAID is just dumb and mostly not supported.

[DontLetMeDrown]

Honestly, when it comes to startup, Pro Tools just sucks compared to the competition. Seriously why tf in 2019 does it load every plugin at startup? It should only do that when the user chooses to scan in the preference menu like nearly every other DAW. I have over 500 plugins, so you can imagine how long my PT startup is even with an i7 loading everything from an NVMe drive.

[kirkbross]

Originally Posted by BScout

Striping an OS over a RAID is just dumb and mostly not supported.

It is a thought exercise for sure.

This is old, from 2011 but a fun watch if you haven't seen it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8

[john1192]

Originally Posted by DontLetMeDrown

Honestly, when it comes to startup, Pro Tools just sucks compared to the competition. Seriously why tf in 2019 does it load every plugin at startup? It should only do that when the user chooses to scan in the preference menu like nearly every other DAW. I have over 500 plugins, so you can imagine how long my PT startup is even with an i7 loading everything from an NVMe drive.

toss the prefs and it makes it load everything again .. !!!! super slow yes

[Darryl Ramm]

What exactly are you looking at/worried by? Plugin load times themselves? Plugin loading/scanning affects Pro Tools application startup time not the session start up. Is it Pro Tools startup that is the issue? Or is it the session? Separate those things and be clear. If it's the session then it may be plugins pre-loading samples, maybe made worse by concurrently trying to pre-load huge sessions into dick cache? You can play around... try setting disk cache to normal, try setting VI samples to stream etc. Asking others to guess is likely not going to help. And then you can get more detailed using systems performance tools, looking at wether stuff appears pegged on a few cores or one core and or how much disk or memory is being beaten up.

And yes try trashing prefs and rebuilding stuff (horribly slow the first time) and see if that improves things.

[kirkbross]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

What exactly are you looking at/worried by?

I'm not worried or concerned about anything really. It's just a thought experiment.

There exists an imaginary computer with an imaginary architecture that could load, for example, Hans Zimmer's largest session in under 1 second. I'm just wondering what the specs of that [imaginary] computer would be. i.e. what attributes (single core cycles, multi-core count, RAM speed, RAM amount, throughput, etc.) would be the key ingredient(s) to achieve that feat.