On the topic of sluggishness in FCPX...

Hi all. I've seen many people talking about the idea of FCPX sometimes feeling "Sluggish". Sometimes this is pre 10.1.x sometimes only after.

In my experience, post 10.1 I found an increased responsiveness initially only to find that FCPX would become less responsive over time and require a restart. By over time, I mean something around 20-30 minutes of use.

I'd like to share my experience in trying to narrow down the issue in case it helps or in case other people might be able to build on my observations.

I have found that certain background tasks (such as generating wave forms)will slow the system down, which I find completely understandable.

Where it gets interesting for me is that if i bring up the background task manager window to identify the sluggishness I find that sometimes a background task is being performed but not actually progressing. I often cannot cancel the task. If I click on the X to stop the task, nothing changes. The progress bar looking like it is preparing to perform a task but not actually performing it. If I shut down FCPX and restart the app the background task is not resumed and the snappy responsiveness will returned for about a half an hour or so.

Now to go deeper...sometimes I find when I experience this sluggishness I open to the background task manager only to find that there are no background tasks running. And yet, when I go to restart FCPX for a brief moment a window will appear saying "Cancelling background tasks" suggesting background tasks are in fact being performed despite the BG task window not showing any.

When I noticed this I decided to try to shut down FCPX when it was still snappy and responsive. I noticed that it shut down without displaying the "Cancelling background tasks" message.

So...no conclusions yet. But it seems possible that sometime background tasks are being performed which the BG task manager is not displaying and not giving the option to cancel giving the illusion that FCPX is sluggish when no background tasks are apparently being performed.

For the record I am operating an late iMac 2012 3GB Ram with a 2GB GFX card and an R6 thunderbolt RAID. I have moved projects onto my internal SSD to cut the RAID out of the equation and the same behaviour as been observed.

Feel free to discuss...

I was trying out the new 10.1.1 update last night. After 30 minutes or so it started running slow. I opened Activity monitor and noticed I was down to 3.2 GB of ram left. I never got below 12GB of Ram left with 10.1.0. I have a late 2013 27 inch iMac 3.4 GHz i5 24GB of ram and GTX 775m GPU with 2GB of VRAM. I am wondering if this is a memory leak.

Dave