Multi (Hyper) threading and PT 11

[audiobob]

If anyone remembers I had posted some videos a while back of the issue of running out of CPU on my 12 core MacPro 5,1 - 24g ram. Recording voice overs with a low buffer, at 32 for low latency, would send CPU usage all over the place with constant CPU spikes that would stop recording. This happened on a fresh install of Yosemite with only PT installed an nothing else running. Of course, everything runs great at high buffers when mixing and editing, but it's just not an option while recording voice over.

Searching around I saw mention of how turning off multithreading helps...so I've done it over the past few months with pretty good results. Not to say the spikes are totally gone...but they've dropped by at least 85%.

So I'm sharing a video I did yesterday. Session with voice over, a music track and video and DMG Equality plug, Avid Pro Compressor and Limiter. First I scrub video back and forth with multithreading on. Check out the system usage. It's off the chart...with total usage constantly peaking at 95 to 100%. Then shut down PT, turn off multithreading and perform the same test. CPU usage WAY down. It does spike at 100% once, and another fairly high...but overall the CPU's handle it very well. I was amazed.



This is no scientific experiment and I'm no programmer. No, I don't constantly scrub video...but apparently scrubbing is CPU intensive with Native and the difference with multithreading on/off is very noticeable. Also I rarely us VI's and as usual YMMV...this may not help everyone...but I though it was significant enough to post here.

Would like to hear others chime in.

Bob

[musicmixer04]

hi this is cool. where is the menu to disable this?

[audiobob]

Originally Posted by musicmixer04

hi this is cool. where is the menu to disable this?

Download Xcode. Control-click on the app, select Show Package Contents then go to Contents > Applications and drag the app Instruments to the dock. Open Instruments, go to Preferences and select the CPUs tab and uncheck Hardware Multi-threading. It will stay this way even through a log out, but will reset after a restart.

[notedmusic]

I thought it was working but then I saw this

[mesaone]

It's a double-edged sword. I think people are going to see varying results, even on similar systems.

[musicmixer04]

Download Xcode. Control-click on the app, select Show Package Contents then go to Contents > Applications and drag the app Instruments to the dock. Open Instruments, go to Preferences and select the CPUs tab and uncheck Hardware Multi-threading. It will stay this way even through a log out, but will reset after a restart.

thanks:)

I did install Xcode and tried it out on my late 2013 retina macbook pro. I'm currently working in a pretty big project with 100+ tracks and sometimes get "ran out of cpu" Whats bother me is that there is still 60% idle CPU in Activity Monitor. Anyone experienced the same thing?

Whats the point of buying a new mac with more cpu when Pro Tools Fails only using 40%. hmm

Didn't seem that disable hyper threading did it for me either. Get same errors just shows 4 cores instead of 8 in the system usage window.