How can I decrease Save times?

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dix
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How can I decrease Save times?

Post by dix »

I'm working on an ever-growing, largish project. Save times are getting annoyingly long and distracting - like 4 seconds of beachball currently. Activity Monitor reports DP is using 20gb of 24gb RAM I have installed. That seems pretty tight. Is faster save times for DP among the reasons to add RAM

[EDIT: Do'h! Subject line changed! I meant to to say decrease Save times]
Last edited by dix on Sat Feb 24, 2018 2:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Will more RAM increase Save times?

Post by FMiguelez »

Have you flushed your undo history?

It may grow out of control and cause slow save times (and unnecessarily large DP files).
Last edited by FMiguelez on Sat Feb 10, 2018 3:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Will more RAM increase Save times?

Post by cuttime »

I would say no unless you are seeing memory swaps in Activity Monitor. The swaps would be page outs to disk that definitely would increase save times.
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Re: Will more RAM increase Save times?

Post by mikehalloran »

What do you mean by increase save times? The goal should be to reduce save times i.e. make them faster.

Since Save is a write to drive function, RAM size isn't the biggest factor. It does buffer as does the drive cache but the write speed of the drive has more to do with it. A'B an SSD with an HHD on the same system and you will see this.

There are a number of processes that have memory leaks. If I leave a DP project open for hours, my available RAM will go to less than 1G and DP will freeze. Is it DP, one or more plugins or all of the above? I have no idea but I can repeat this and test available RAM. Other apps, browsers and web sites all contribute to the problem—it's not unique to DP.

Rebooting flushes RAM better than anything else. I reboot daily and have ever since I went to SSDs. Before that, rebooting was something I had to do before I had breakfast as I do my day job from home.

High Sierra is more forgiving and handles memory management a lot better, I've noticed, but doesn't address the basic issue. APFS reduces Save time but it only affects SSDs booting into High Sierra.

Although there are many reports that DP doesn't require more than 16G RAM, it's not the only app being run on my Mac and , I bet everyone else's. I had occasional freezes with 24G and none since I went to 32G.
Last edited by mikehalloran on Sat Feb 10, 2018 3:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Will more RAM increase Save times?

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

32GB here as well. Not a hitch in a very long time.
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by dix »

Gah! Yes, decreased is what I'm after. Sorry (Subject line changed).
Have you flushed your undo history?
It's quite short actually. The DP file itself is 69mb. Disabling VIs decreases the save time which tells me that if I move all the VIs to VEP I could decouple and get back to short save times. From what I can tell DPs new pre-gen scheme performs about as well as using VEP6 (same computer. no slave), but I was pulling for DP to make VEP irrelevant. In this regard that is not yet the case.
Although there are many reports that DP doesn't require more than 16G RAM
Activity Monitor is saying DP is using 20.4GB (just after booting btw). DP may not require more than 16gb, but it's taking more than that apparently.

I just ordered 16GB more of RAM. I'll likely be on this same project by the time it arrives. I'll report back if the save time changes...although it seems unlikely.

Thanks!
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by mikehalloran »

Gah! Yes, decreased is what I'm after. Sorry (Subject line changed). ...
Well, I assumed but you know what the say about that. :oops:
I just ordered 16GB more of RAM. I'll likely be on this same project by the time it arrives. I'll report back if the save time changes...although it seems unlikely. ...
Yes, it should have little effect on save time but there are other advantages. This will put you at 40G which should give you a good level without overdoing it.

Since you are using UAD and VEP, I’m not going to recommend going to High Sierra/APFS in the middle of a project. The same OS 10.13 workaround applies to both and that is to disable VSTs in DP. Hopefully, MOTU, Apple et all will have this nut cracked soon.
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by James Steele »

mikehalloran wrote:
Gah! Yes, decreased is what I'm after. Sorry (Subject line changed). ...
Well, I assumed but you know what the say about that. :oops:
I just ordered 16GB more of RAM. I'll likely be on this same project by the time it arrives. I'll report back if the save time changes...although it seems unlikely. ...
Yes, it should have little effect on save time but there are other advantages. This will put you at 40G which should give you a good level without overdoing it.
The only thing I wonder about is the processor hit you take when you put RAM in slots 4 and 8? I noticed a pretty sizeable decline in the Geekbench score when RAM was loaded into those slots (that share a memory channel with slots 3 and 7).
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by dix »

Oh, yeah. I remember hearing something about those slots being problematic. Fortunately I have four slots open so I should be good. Thanks for the reminder though.
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by philbrown »

I work on the same kinds of jobs week after week. Files over an hour long, but simple dialog projects as DP projects go. The file size keeps increasing as I work and save. BUT if I look at the most recent autosave it's always considerably smaller. Why is that? I don't know, but if I rename the autosave and use it as the main file I now have a much reduced file size. Undo history did not do the same thing. It's been consistent like this through several DP versions (back to v5 at least) and through OS changes and computer replacement.

I have never heard of the Slot 4 and 8 thing. I bought a Mac that had 64GB installed. Maybe I should remove slot 4 and 8 ram sticks?? Can someone add any info or reference about that?

Stating the obvious but SSD's are the best way to decrease save/load/boot times.
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by mikehalloran »

James Steele wrote: The only thing I wonder about is the processor hit you take when you put RAM in slots 4 and 8? I noticed a pretty sizeable decline in the Geekbench score when RAM was loaded into those slots (that share a memory channel with slots 3 and 7).
The effect is called memory latency and used to be a hotly debated subject regarding the Mac Pro. That pretty much died down when it was discovered that it affected Geekbench tests (which do measure it) more than real world applications like Photoshop and video editing where no one notices the difference. With those applications, the benefits of more RAM far outweigh the possibility of a memory latency issue.

The current Apple tech bulletin no longer mentions it
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205043

The 2009-older bulletins that mentioned it are no longer on the Apple site (at least the links I found to them are dead).

Memory latency increases as more RAM slots are filled (true for all Macs) but with the Mac Pro, there was a more notable increase when slots 4/8 were filled than between 2/4 to 3/6 and 1/2 to 2/3.
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by HCMarkus »

The Xeon processors used in cheese graters use a triple-channel architecture. From Wikipedia:
When operating in triple-channel mode, memory latency is reduced due to interleaving, meaning that each module is accessed sequentially for smaller bits of data rather than completely filling up one module before accessing the next one. Data is spread amongst the modules in an alternating pattern, potentially tripling available memory bandwidth for the same amount of data, as opposed to storing it all on one module.

The architecture can only be used when all three, or a multiple of three, memory modules are identical in capacity and speed, and are placed in three-channel slots. When two memory modules are installed, the architecture will operate in dual-channel architecture mode.
As Mike notes, having enough RAM is far more important than how many modules are used.
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by dix »

So I got more RAM and DP is a bit more responsive. Saving in DP is unaffected as predicted.

What's weird is, the project I was working on was consistently taking up 20gb of RAM in the Activity Monitor, but as soon as as I added more RAM it started taking up 24gb. Does the OS allow apps to use more RAM if they need it based on how much RAM is installed?
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by mikehalloran »

Yes but only up to a point

Any more than an app can use won’t make a difference.
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Re: Will more RAM decrease Save times?

Post by philbrown »

Try opening up the most recent autosave and see how the file size compares and if the RAM usage is any different.
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