Digital Performer 9.5 Massive Memory Leak

[seedylee]

Today, I woke my Mac to find an error message that the system had run out of application memory. Iwas surprised by this, because this machine has 24 GB of RAM, ample swap, and it's the first time I'd ever seen this message.

Turns out that Digital Performer was using a whopping 84 GB of memory - with no plugins or virtual instruments loaded, just a dozen empty audio tracks and a dozen empty MIDI tracks.

I couldn't really debug further because the system was completely unresponsive, but has anyone else ever come across such problems in the past? Any known solutions or causes?

[HCMarkus]

Running 9.52 for quite a while now, under Sierra, never any issues like that. But I shut down every night.

[James Steele]

I haven't ran into that myself. So you quit and restarted it and all was okay I'm guessing. Since it's 9.52, if it is a problem that people are having, MOTU is about to release DP 10, so I would doubt there would be any maintenance release for 9.52.

[seedylee]

Thank you both. I'm not entirely unconvinced that it wasn't somehow related to a plugin, even if none were active. As far as I can tell, plugins are the devil when it comes to SAW stability. I will keep an eye on it and see what happens. Good to know it's not a common occurrence, which means it's probably more related to cosmic rays or bad juju than bad software.

Thanks!

[labman]

This leak has been true for the past year or two. Comes outta nowhere, and is really rare. Happens here in 24/7 type room maybe once every 3 months. Reboot and fine. (We also replace with our stored clean DP prefs just outta habit.) No clue whether its third party stuff or not as we are never just working within DP by itself.

We personally discussed it with several of our trusted folks at Motu many moons ago. So they were aware.

[mikehalloran]

Memory leaks are a fact of life. Browsers and browser plugins seem to be the worst. It’s akin to whack-a-mole as developers try to minimize them and fail.

When I had 24G R/AM on board, having DP (8 at the time) up all day didn’t do much if there’s an empty project. Load up an old project with plugins and my machine may freeze after 5 to 12 hours. ??? Depends on the project.

Since maxing out my iMac to 32G RAM and rebooting every day, I haven’t experienced this problem but I have tools that tell me I sometimes have less than 3GB available RAM by the end of the day.

The internet is full of armchair idio—experts who go on at length saying why this should never be an issue while ignoring the fact that it is.

I don’t notice 9.52 is any worse in this regard. I use Izotope and other plugins but I don’t know they are much worse or better than others. Finale 2014.5 had issues. I still use Word 2008 and it has a major memory leak.

Yes, I could spend a lot of time trying to figure out how much of it is DP but life’s too short. I’m certain that some of my plugs are worse.

My next Mac will either have 64G RAM onboard or be easily upgradable.

[seedylee]

Well, I've left DP 9.5 running for 4 days now and memory usage hasn't crept beyond about 300 MB. Must have just been a ghost in the machine.

Thanks everyone for your replies.