Sluggish GUI performance (7.01)

[banta24]

Heya,

Has anyone got suggestions for improving my GUI performance? I find that scrolling, meter response etc. is incredibly sluggish, especially during playback.

I'm running a G5 with dual 2.3GHz procs and 8GB of ram. My CPU load while experiencing slow GUI interaction is roughly 30-40%.

I just moved to 7.01 yesterday, but it seems equally as sluggish as my 5.13 was.

Is this just endemic with all DP versions? Are they working on it?

Thanks!

[kassonica]

How many tracks are you running and what is your buffer set on?.

[banta24]

I'm running about 20'ish tracks along with individually Rewired Reason outputs to about 10 tracks. FX on perhaps 12 tracks, most of which are through my UAD-1's.

Buffer is set to 1024, Host Multiplier 1, Priority High

Thanks!

[James Steele]

I'm running about 20'ish tracks along with individually Rewired Reason outputs to about 10 tracks. FX on perhaps 12 tracks, most of which are through my UAD-1's.

Buffer is set to 1024, Host Multiplier 1, Priority High

Thanks!

Again...highly unsual. What kind of audio interface? Try setting work priority on medium. I have same system as you and don't have those issues. How much free space left on your boot drive?

[dosuna11]

Reason 4 is a big CPU hog. Which version? Thor!

[banta24]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the responses. I am running Reason 4. Thing is, my CPU usage is quite low while running the project and the slugging scrolling etc. persists. I opened a couple of other projects last night and they are all equally slow, regardless of Reason, BFD etc. rewired in.

My Boot Drive has at least 50GB free on it.

I can hear "processing" noises from the actual computer box itself during scrolling. Is this normal?

Could it be that I'm driving 2 22" monitors and it's the video card that can't keep up?

I'm admittedly a PC guy and not the owner of the studio, so I could be missing some basic Mac optimizations. i.e. Do you need to defrag a Mac?

EDIT: Forgot to say that the interfaces are 1x HD192 and 2X 2408

Thanks again for the help!

[carrythebanner]

As I mentioned in another thread:

I've noticed that things can be sluggish sometimes in DP 6 or 7 on a G5 if Event Info is showing in the Info Bar.

[keybored0]

One of the beauties of DP is its stunning detail of data, but it comes at a price. Try hiding any other running apps when you need to do a lot of scrolling and things are sluggish. For example, Kontakt is a graphic hog when visible (can nearly double cpu usage) which is why they have gone lo-fi in their GUI, and Bidule too can tax the system if plugin windows are open. An option such as the tracks window to reduce data display would be useful in the sequencer editor.

Just a suggestion...sometimes it helps

[climber]

I agree about hiding things helping in general. I used to show all my plugs on a second 22" monitor while I was working on my 30" in 5.1.3. it was slowish but workable even with 20+ plugs open. that is unacceptable on 7.0.1. hiding all the other stuff made a HUGE diff. that said I miss seeing everything at one time. [sigh]

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Close some windows.

[banta24]

I seem to have the same sluggishness regardless of the number of windows open. Could it be the 64mb video card? I have a 256mb ATI lying around that I could try if you think it might help.

Thanks again for the help

[jpiscitello]

Definitely open plugs cause sluggishness, but it depends on the plug. I can open tons of Waves plugins no problem. But a single Omnisphere and things can be toast.

DP is far too slow to redraw, anyway. It's not enough to say "just upgrade your G5 dual to an 8-core tower). Cause once I do that, I'm just going to load it up with tons of plugins anyway and I will be back where I started.

And it's not just plugs. I turned off the Tracks Selector feature because it was too slow to be useful. The new Selection window thingy is also slow. Showing and hiding the left and right hand columns in the consolidated window - all these things are (in my humble opinion) pitifully slow. Without or without plugs.

For a while I worked at Google. They would do user interface tests..they found that if the search results were slowed down by as a little as 300 ms, users would search less often. People need things to be instantaneous on a computer to be productive.

According to the book Superfreakonomics (some of you may have read me comment on this in another thread), a 1-second delay in a computer program causes "cognitive drift" in users.

In other words, when DP loads slowly, we can't keep our minds on our work. :-oI'd love to see some serious performance enhancements done on the program. I think the program is due for some work on that.

[Michael Canavan]

Hi guys,
I am running Reason 4. Thing is, my CPU usage is quite low while running the project and the slugging scrolling etc. persists. I opened a couple of other projects last night and they are all equally slow, regardless of Reason, BFD etc. rewired in.


I can hear "processing" noises from the actual computer box itself during scrolling. Is this normal?

Thing is painfully so, the computer is older, and the CPU read out you get in DP is only for DP. Open Activity Monitor (spotlight it or go to System/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor), and you'll see the real CPU usage of the machine. My guess is you're pushing DP and the computer to the limit. Graphics slowing down are a sign of that.

Also, it's very possible that the video card will not work in the G5, they require a specific make and I eventually gave up on my old G5 and found the exact same card to replace a fried one.

[banta24]

I keep going back to my experiences with Samplitude. Unless my CPU was totally overloading, I would have extremely responsive GUI interaction, even while playing tons of tracks.

It seemed that the plugs would suffer visual slowdowns when under load, but not the scrolling, editing etc. of the track window. Maybe they just balance it differently, or give priority to different processes.

The computer I was working on at the time is less powerful by an order of magnitude than my boss's DP machine. I wonder what it is that Samp was doing to maintain their GUI performance under load?

I will try hiding every plugin and see if that helps. I suppose I could have some stuff hanging out in the background that I've forgotten to close down. I'll double check.

Edit: I posted the above while Michael was posting his response. I will definitely check out the spotlight and see what the overall CPU usage is. Also, thanks for the heads up on the GPU. It's that kind of non-upgradable situation that put me off of Mac's in the 1st place lol.

[Michael Canavan]

Edit: I posted the above while Michael was posting his response. I will definitely check out the spotlight and see what the overall CPU usage is. Also, thanks for the heads up on the GPU. It's that kind of non-upgradable situation that put me off of Mac's in the 1st place lol.

Not Spotlight, that's the search engine. The name of the application in OSX to search for in Spotlight is Activity Monitor.

Honestly, saying that about the GPU issue I talked about is pretty silly. G5's are the ONLY Mac machines that have odd Graphics cards. There was a shoot out between two competing replacements for old PCI slots, and the one Apple had in the G5's lost. It was definitely NOT an Apple proprietary non upgradable thing!! Most PC users are absolutely ignorant about what it is in a Mac you cannot upgrade, the main and only thing that's constant is the motherboard, and people have even figured out how to do that in some cases. Graphics cards, RAM, Hard drives, optical drives etc. all are upgradable outside Apple.