CPU running high

[bmcbean49]

I have the MacPro 2x667 with 8gb (8x1gb) of RAM (upgraded from 5).
I also recently brought Komplete 8 crossgrade to add to my collection.
I was working on a tune and happened to notice my CPU was running over 200%.
Before I brought Komplete 8 I was running about 20-30%.

What could be causing my Mac to run so high? The K8?

Any ideas?

[bayswater]

Is your Mac indexing those many gigabytes of samples for Spotlight?

[bmcbean49]

Is your Mac indexing those many gigabytes of samples for Spotlight?

Hello,
I do not fully understand your question. I would have to say no.
What is Spotlight?

Thanks

[bayswater]

There will be a magnifying glass in the upper right corner of your screen. That's Spotlight. It is the search feature in Mac OS. So it can find files quickly, it indexes just about everything in your system. While it does that, the Mac runs very slowly. If you had just installed a very large set of sample files, and then launched Komplete, it might have been indexing the files while you were trying to run it.

You can use spotlight preferences to exclude some drives and folders from the indexing, or even disable Spotlight altogether.

[FMiguelez]

Spotlight is your OS's way of indexing your files, so you can find them quickly by typing names (or parts of file names, etc).

Use the Help menu under the Finder and search for Spotlight.

If this is the case, give your computer some time, so it finishes indexing your drives. OR, you can prevent it from indexing by going to the Spotlight section in the OS preferences and, under privacy, drag the disk(s) you do not want to be indexed.

I think we posted at the exact same time, Bayswater

[bmcbean49]

Thank you Bayswater and FMiguelez for this info.
Learning is growing! I will let you both know what happens.

Thanks Again.

[bmcbean49]

Hello again,

Well I disable spotlight and it is still running over 100%...like 200%.
Any other ideas?

Thank you!

[bayswater]

The most direct thing to look at is Activity Monitor which you will find in the Utilities folder in Applications. Set to show all processes. It will show you the amount of CPU etc being used by each process. You can sort the list in order of CPU consumed to see what is using the most.

[bmcbean49]

Good Morning,

The Activity monitor is how I noticed the problem.

[bmcbean49]

DP is using 200% cpu

[bayswater]

If you can describe the song (track counts, VI and plugin counts), your audio setup (things like buffer size), perhaps someone else using Komplete 8 on a similar Mac can comment on whether 200% is a problem.

Running 30-40 mono tracks with eq and compression on most, and 4 or 5 instances of Sampletank Miroslav and Aria, I will see a total of about 150-200% -- using istat -- across 8 cores on the iMac with an i7 processor with the buffer set at 256 or 512. So 200% may not be out of line depending on exactly what you are doing with Komplete.

[bmcbean49]

Hi Bayswater,

I eliminated unused tracks and CPU went from 200% to 122%.
So it is definitely track related.
So let me ask a question? Can more RAM give juice to lower CPU usage?
Still learning so please excuse any stupid questions.
Thanks for all your help

[bmcbean49]

One other thing that I completely forgot was to increase the buffer size on playing back a song. it now registers 87%.
When you record your buffer it should be at 256 or 512, but when you play the song back it should be at 1024.

[bayswater]

Seems to me that you are running in a normal range if you have a few Instruments loaded.

Concerning RAM, you will hear from many people that you should have as much as you can afford. I'm not so sure it matters so much. The theoretical max DP can use itself is 4G. If you look at Activity Monitor, it will tell you how much RAM is not being used. If you have unused RAM, it is not likely that more RAM will help.

The article below describes Activity Monitor. Have a look at the page in and out section. As the article says, increasing RAM may reduce the amount of material being moved back and forth between RAM and disks due to lack of RAM availability. I'm not entirely convinced that this will make a noticeable difference to CPU usage in the real world, but it's worth a look.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1342" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[bmcbean49]

I agree with your assessment on RAM after reading the article.
Komplete 8 is a monster, so going forward I have to be very mindful
on the tracks I use.
Getting a more powerful MacPro maybe a solution but not in my budget
at the moment.
Thanks for all your help Bayswater.