Sudden Master Fader Peaks

[ccrane]

Since DP 8, I’ve been getting erroneous peaks in the Master Fader.

What happens is that I will have a limiter on the master fader that is running the audio with about .5db to spare before peaking. All is well, then all of a sudden I will see red peak signals on the master fader that were not happening before. This seems to happen after working on several different projects throughout the day with fresh restarts of DP in between. It just happened now in the latest build of DP 9.13 on OS 10.12.4. When I subsequently loaded the project in DP8, the peaks were still there.

The only thing that clears the peaks is to restart the computer. That always works. This happens on two different computers and has been happening since DP 8 and OS 10.8 I believe. The type of limiter does not seem to make a difference, I've encountered the peaks with Waves L3, PSP Xenon and FabFilter Pro-L so far. It seems to happen every week or two on projects of varying density.

[mikehalloran]

How much RAM do you have? Do you reboot every day?

[ccrane]

Thanks for replying Mike.

This has been happening on both of my computers.
12GB on the 2012 Mac 12core and 24GB on the 2010 12core.
Always plenty of RAM available, especially on the Mac with 24GB. Still, I should probably increase the RAM on the Mac with 12GB. I did notice some unexpected DP improvements on my 2010 Mac when I bumped up the RAM.

I only reboot when I have to! I was under the impression that the OS could basically maintain itself without daily reboots. As only a system restart fixes the problem you could be on to something.
Please elaborate.

-Chris

[mikehalloran]

Always plenty of RAM available, especially on the Mac with 24GB.

How do you know? I use TechTool Pro to tell me how much RAM I actually have available. Before I upgraded, I sometimes had less than 1G available. My iMac had the same symptoms with 20G. Maxing it out at 32G fixed me up.

Try running the following in Terminal next time this happens: sudo purge

If it helps, add more RAM. If it doesn't, may not be the issue.

Are you just recording audio or are you running VIs? If VIs, how many instances?

[ccrane]

I always have Activity Monitor open to keep an eye on RAM, a habit formed from the 32bit days when on ML. There I could see how much RAM I had available and also check on Page Outs. In Sierra, the "pressure" is always in the green and Swap Used is at zero.

Techtool Pro, which I do not currently have sounds like a very good investment.

There seems to be no correlation to CPU usage or RAM from what I can tell so far. You bring up a good point though about the RAM as a restart does fix the problem. I will try the sudo purge command the next time the issue comes up. I've run it in the past and was able to squeeze out a little more memory. If it works, I will report back.

This has happened on sequences with and without active VI's. I do tend to run a lot of dense sequences in general though.

When the master fader peaks do happen I believe it effects all sequences, I will check for that specifically the next time.

Thanks

-CC

[ccrane]

My iMac had the same symptoms with 20G. Maxing it out at 32G fixed me up.

By the same symptoms, do you mean unexplained master fader peaks?