dix wrote:Based on info in another thread (
http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... 26&t=59591) I just downloaded MenuMeter and I'm trying to understand it. MenuMeter doesn't seem to reflect what DP's Audio Performance meter says at all. I can have a sequence that's almost unplayable, that pegs DP's AP meter (Playback meter well in the green. Barely moving), but none of the threads, according to MenuMeter, are close to maxing out. If DP's meter is maxing out shouldn't MenuMeter reflect that in some way?
I'm looking into this because Shooshie mentions that if MenuMeter shows a core maxing out that you can redistribute the VIs to even out the load. I'd like to do that but none of the cores are maxed and I'm still bogging down. What's going on?
Thanks!
The previous message by Nightwatch explains it pretty nicely:
nightwatch wrote:I'm sure everyone knows that the CPU meter is showing what percentage of the CPU OS X has allocated for DP to use. Keep in mind there are many other threads running and the CPU meter in DP is not an indication of your CPU's state - just DP's allocation of the CPU.
OS X allocates memory and CPU time for DP; DP's meter shows what percentage of that space it's using. It's not that cores will always max out from DP, though sometimes they do. It's the relative activity that is telling. If your Audio Performance meter in DP shows it is red-lining, but you see only one core active, or primarily one core active — especially if it's jumping up and down — then you might see if breaking a large instance of a VI host like Kontakt could distribute the load.
Honestly, I haven't had to deal with memory and CPU issues in DP since going 64 bit, so maybe all this is just habit from an earlier era. Still, I catch things all the time from watching MenuMeters. For example, I had a bunch of tabs in Safari open last week, and the CPU activity just kept getting wilder and wilder, involving all 12 cores. I don't know what was on those websites that was causing those issues, but I started looking for things to close, and when I closed most of those tabs, the activity went away. I wasn't even using Safari. It was just open in the background. Had I run DP at that time, I would have wondered why it was performing poorly, but MenuMeters showed me a problem and caused me to search out and rectify the situation.
I'm not sure why Nightwatch says NOT to use MenuMeters, but I say to go ahead and use it. You can still do everything he suggested, plus have MenuMeters showing you the relative activity among your CPU cores at any given instant. When you see something interesting, that would be a good time to switch to Activity Monitor to see what is specifically causing that activity. I've certainly never had any trouble as a result of using MenuMeters, and they have been most helpful. In fact, I don't really like to use a Mac anymore without them. You do have to keep them up to date, but that's not difficult.
Shooshie