DP 11 crashes when saving - HELP!

[PolimniaMusic]

Hello guys...

I am in desperate mode at this time.

I have been building up my template for more than 6 months now. I tried composing without a template in the past and I waste too much time choosing instruments, parameters, etc. every single time. Naturally, the file has grown very large, about 2.5 Gb, empty.
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DP CRASHES WHEN SAVING
The problem is that when I tried to save any changes, DP gets stuck, and either it crashes or I have to force-quit it.
 
I know that DP may take quite some time to save large files—and it may even appear as “not responsive” at times…—but this was usually temporary; DP would recover, and you can continue working.

However, for weeks now, (almost) every time I try to save, DP freezes, doesn’t wake up, or it even has hard crashes altogether. Moreover, if I wait too much, the entire iMac collapses and shuts down…
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MEMORY LEAK?
In the Activity Monitor, I noticed that the memory allocated to DP keeps growing (even when the program is unresponsive), from 50-60 Gb to ridiculous amounts (150, 170… even over 200 Gb…).
If I don’t force-quit DP, the whole computer collapses and shuts off.
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MOTU TECHNICAL SUPPORT
I contacted MOTU Tech Support. We have been back and forth, but they don’t know. And barely follow up… days with no response. In the end, They haven’t been able to fix the problem, and eventually stopped responding to me.

I also joined Matt LaPoint's Webinar and got to ask there. But it was a written question and couldn't provide much context. Matt is fantastic and mentioned a few possible causes, but I had already done what he suggested.
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SYSTEM
My system is solid and shouldn’t be the problem: 

DP version 11.22
3.8 Processor 8-core Intel i7
RAM: 128 Gb DDR4
Audio interfase: MOTU M4

The project is completely EMPTY. 
No audio tracks. Only MIDI and VIs.
When a VI becomes too large, I split it into several instances so they don’t occupy RAM unnecessarily.
Also, the reverbs of most VI’s are “off,” and are routed through general reverbs to simplify things and alleviate the CPU.
All VIs are disabled, and all samples are purged. 
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THINGS THAT I HAVE TRIED:

DIFFERENT USER — I tried logging as a different user. Didn’t work.

DIFFERENT DRIVE — Tried copying the project on an external drive (where I have the sound libraries) and open the project from there. Didn’t work either. 

OTHER "SAVE" TYPES — Tried “save as’, or “save a copy as…”. Same.

NO AUTOSAVE — Tried disabling the “Auto-save” (because it seemed that DP was trying to save by itself while I was working (the definition of autosave…) and I thought that it could be hurting the CPU. Nope.
PLUGINS DISABLED — I tried disabling all plugins and starting with only Kontakt. Besides the error messages (expected) indicating that some plugins were missing, I got the same results. I manually eliminated two plugins that failed the test, but even after that, DP was acting the same way, so I concluded that the problems weren’t those 2 failed plugins.

DELETION OF PARTS OF THE TEMPLATE. I tried isolating the problem by saving the families of instruments of this template separately (only WW, only BR, only PERC, etc.). I also tried to do the opposite: eliminate entire families (no WW, no ST, etc.), but I repeatedly got the error -116 size checked failed.”
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Please, help!
You guys are my last resource...

I don’t want to have to change DAWs... I am tired of colleagues or friends telling me that DP is "old and doesn’t work", "or too heavy", or that I would be "better off with Cubase or Logic," but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I still believe that DP is a fantastic software. I know people like you guys are very successful with DP.  But the reality is that my colleagues that use other DAWs don’t have these problems and I do…

Any suggestions? 
I don’t know what else I could do… I can’t work this way.

Thank you very much in advance for your time.
I am even willing to pay someone if he or she is able to once and for all fix my DP issues.

Pablo

[James Steele]

Hopefully you can get some help from uses here. To start with though, I had to move your topic into the "Troubleshooting" forum as that's the appropriate place for this type of post. Thanks.

[HCMarkus]

You could use the approach that works to find troublesome plugins...

Open a copy of your template. Delete 1/2 of the tracks. If the crash on save occurs, try again, deleting the other 1/2 of your tracks.

Assuming you find one version does not crash, go back to the one that does and delete 1/2 of the tracks from the problem version. Continue until you narrow things down to a single track (at least we can hope!)

Also, I'm sure you have tried LOADING your template into a new project, right?

Good luck!

[mikehalloran]

DP gets stuck, and either it crashes or I have to force-quit it.

Is it actually crashing with a crash report or is it freezing or both?

[James Steele]

Just sort of kinda of spitballing here. I think HC Markus had a good suggestion and that is use the process of elimination and delete half the tracks and save a copy... if that crashes, open it complete project again and delete the other half to see if that *doesn't* crash. It shouldn't. Go back to the project with the project that crashed and keep whittling it down until you may have found the culprit plugin.

Also, when you said you disabled all plugins, do you mean that you just bypassed them? That's probably not going to prevent a crash if a plugin is responsible as they're not truly "disconnected" from the audio engine in bypassed state. You should go to the Track Overview and click the little blue ball in the "ENA" column so the track is disabled. That completely removes it and associated plugins from the audio engine... at least I think it does. See if that helps.

Did you get any crashlogs after you crash? If so did MOTU ask you to send one or more to them? I'm no expert, but might help if you attached one to a post here and maybe some of the more experienced people could at least take a look at it and perhaps get lucky. Something might jump out.

[Michael Canavan]

_____________________________________________________________

SYSTEM
My system is solid and shouldn’t be the problem: 

DP version 11.22
3.8 Processor 8-core Intel i7
RAM: 128 Gb DDR4
Audio interfase: MOTU M4

The project is completely EMPTY. 
No audio tracks. Only MIDI and VIs.
When a VI becomes too large, I split it into several instances so they don’t occupy RAM unnecessarily.
Also, the reverbs of most VI’s are “off,” and are routed through general reverbs to simplify things and alleviate the CPU.
All VIs are disabled, and all samples are purged. 
_____________________________________________________________

DELETION OF PARTS OF THE TEMPLATE. I tried isolating the problem by saving the families of instruments of this template separately (only WW, only BR, only PERC, etc.). I also tried to do the opposite: eliminate entire families (no WW, no ST, etc.), but I repeatedly got the error -116 size checked failed.”
_____________________________________________________________

So what's missing here is an actual body count. You've never once mentioned which VI's, how many etc.
Over at another forum someone was arguing for not using VEP, and their solution was to set up a template, with all VI's disabled except for the bare minimum. This way his DAW could handle all the plugins without memory and CPU issues unless he really needed to be pushing his machine. Opus and Kontakt among other sample hosts have ways of mitigating issues with too many plugins slowing down your DAW. So IMO if you want to host everything in DP and not use VEP it's a good idea to look into the plugins solutions to large templates, and to disable tracks you're not using until you need them. It's super easy to do in the Tracks window, or in the V-Rack mixer.

[PolimniaMusic]

Hopefully you can get some help from uses here. To start with though, I had to move your topic into the "Troubleshooting" forum as that's the appropriate place for this type of post. Thanks.

Thank you, James. I realized later that I should have posted it there.

[PolimniaMusic]

You could use the approach that works to find troublesome plugins...

Open a copy of your template. Delete 1/2 of the tracks. If the crash on save occurs, try again, deleting the other 1/2 of your tracks.

Assuming you find one version does not crash, go back to the one that does and delete 1/2 of the tracks from the problem version. Continue until you narrow things down to a single track (at least we can hope!)

Also, I'm sure you have tried LOADING your template into a new project, right?

Good luck!

Yes, I tried deleting a large number of tracks (i.e., all woodwinds, or all brass, etc.) to try to isolate the issue. The problem is that when I do that, I get an error ("-116 size checked failed").

[PolimniaMusic]

_____________________________________________________________

SYSTEM
My system is solid and shouldn’t be the problem: 

DP version 11.22
3.8 Processor 8-core Intel i7
RAM: 128 Gb DDR4
Audio interfase: MOTU M4

The project is completely EMPTY. 
No audio tracks. Only MIDI and VIs.
When a VI becomes too large, I split it into several instances so they don’t occupy RAM unnecessarily.
Also, the reverbs of most VI’s are “off,” and are routed through general reverbs to simplify things and alleviate the CPU.
All VIs are disabled, and all samples are purged. 
_____________________________________________________________

DELETION OF PARTS OF THE TEMPLATE. I tried isolating the problem by saving the families of instruments of this template separately (only WW, only BR, only PERC, etc.). I also tried to do the opposite: eliminate entire families (no WW, no ST, etc.), but I repeatedly got the error -116 size checked failed.”
_____________________________________________________________

So what's missing here is an actual body count. You've never once mentioned which VI's, how many etc.
Over at another forum someone was arguing for not using VEP, and their solution was to set up a template, with all VI's disabled except for the bare minimum. This way his DAW could handle all the plugins without memory and CPU issues unless he really needed to be pushing his machine. Opus and Kontakt among other sample hosts have ways of mitigating issues with too many plugins slowing down your DAW. So IMO if you want to host everything in DP and not use VEP it's a good idea to look into the plugins solutions to large templates, and to disable tracks you're not using until you need them. It's super easy to do in the Tracks window, or in the V-Rack mixer.

I have all VI tracks disabled, and all samples purged. Until I need a particular instrument, they don't load.

I know that other DAWS (i.e., Cubase) have an easy way to number the tracks, but I don't if DP has that.
We are looking at about 4,400 tracks, broken down into:

- exactly 512 VI tracks
- almost 3,800 MIDI tracks
- about 100 aux tracks

[PolimniaMusic]

Just sort of kinda of spitballing here. I think HC Markus had a good suggestion and that is use the process of elimination and delete half the tracks and save a copy... if that crashes, open it complete project again and delete the other half to see if that *doesn't* crash. It shouldn't. Go back to the project with the project that crashed and keep whittling it down until you may have found the culprit plugin.

Also, when you said you disabled all plugins, do you mean that you just bypassed them? That's probably not going to prevent a crash if a plugin is responsible as they're not truly "disconnected" from the audio engine in bypassed state. You should go to the Track Overview and click the little blue ball in the "ENA" column so the track is disabled. That completely removes it and associated plugins from the audio engine... at least I think it does. See if that helps.

Did you get any crashlogs after you crash? If so did MOTU ask you to send one or more to them? I'm no expert, but might help if you attached one to a post here and maybe some of the more experienced people could at least take a look at it and perhaps get lucky. Something might jump out.

Yes, I disabled all VIs by turning off the blue little ball in the "ENA" column.

You're right about the logs. This time around MOTU didn't ask me about sending those logs.
Months ago, when I started having this issue, the guy did ask me for those. He didn't find anything suspicious in them.
I don't remember now how to get to those reports. Do you, by chance?

In any case, most of the time now what DP does is to freeze... while the RAM allocated continues growing (in jumps of about 5Gb every 4-5 seconds...) until it gets to a point in which either I force-quit the program, or the iMac collapses and turns off...

I will try to attach a video I recorded that shows what it does...

[HCMarkus]

Did you try to LOAD the project into a fresh project?

[PolimniaMusic]

I did.

[PolimniaMusic]

Did you get any crashlogs after you crash? If so did MOTU ask you to send one or more to them? I'm no expert, but might help if you attached one to a post here and maybe some of the more experienced people could at least take a look at it and perhaps get lucky. Something might jump out.

This is the first part of the crash report I got yesterday when the iMac crashed again, after DP got stuck:

____
panic(cpu 8 caller 0xffffff800a6e65c6): "zalloc: zone map exhausted while allocating from zone [compressor_slots.512], " "likely due to memory leak in zone [compressor_slots.512] " "(15780M, 32319128 elements allocated)"@/System/Volumes/Data/SWE/macOS/BuildRoots/880a0f6e74/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-7195.141.29/osfmk/kern/zalloc.c:4500
Backtrace (CPU , Frame : Return Address
0xffffffa28cf3b950 : 0xffffff800a68b26d
0xffffffa28cf3b9a0 : 0xffffff800a7d2993
0xffffffa28cf3b9e0 : 0xffffff800a7c2f8a
0xffffffa28cf3ba30 : 0xffffff800a62fa2f
0xffffffa28cf3ba50 : 0xffffff800a68aa8d
0xffffffa28cf3bb70 : 0xffffff800a68ad83
0xffffffa28cf3bbe0 : 0xffffff800ae9c5fa
0xffffffa28cf3bc50 : 0xffffff800a6e65c6
0xffffffa28cf3bd50 : 0xffffff800a6e9506
0xffffffa28cf3bd90 : 0xffffff800a6e8cb5
0xffffffa28cf3be60 : 0xffffff800a715857
0xffffffa28cf3be90 : 0xffffff800a74b795
0xffffffa28cf3bed0 : 0xffffff800a7532dd
0xffffffa28cf3bf10 : 0xffffff800a752eea
0xffffffa28cf3bfa0 : 0xffffff800a62f13e

Process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task
Boot args: chunklist-security-epoch=0 -chunklist-no-rev2-dev

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What I see is a "memory leak" a probable cause.
Don't know where to go from there...

[Michael Canavan]

Out of curiosity, and flatly you never answered this question, are you using any East West Products? Opus is pretty cool, but people are reporting long wait times with saving with Opus in DP, probably other DAWs too.

[mikehalloran]

"likely due to memory leak

How often do you reboot?