Age old performance question

FC 10.1.4 has ground to a halt. The longer the project gets the slower it goes. I am running 16 gig of ram on an iMac late 2011 on Mavericks 10.9.5. I have opened FC in a new user account and turned off background rendering and waveforms and it gives me constant beach balls when I hit play. Yesterday i couldn't even get FC to open until I trashed the .plist file. But it wouldn't hardly function. It is better in the new user window but still very slow going. Why does it seem to bog down so much as the project lengthens? Is it trying to hold it all in RAM? Adding RAM btw didn't help anything and with my older Mac I am maxed out):

What are the specs of the secondary drive your media and libraries are on?

Yes I know this is an issue. It is an external usb3 drive. However, what I don't understand is how projects work very smoothly when I start and as they increase in length the system slows way down. I never had problems of this nature in fcp 2-6. I had others but not this one. I think a SSD system drive and an external thunderbolt drive would help me out.

Brad, have you checked out this article by Richard Taylor? fcpx.tv/Pages/top10troubleshoot.html . It may be of some help (I hope).

Ed

Is that USB 3.0 external drive a spinning disk drive? If so, verify it is 7200rpm. If it is SSD, there shouldn't be any issues with it much. Also, verify the percentage of each drive, what percentage is free space?

Brad Parso wrote: ...It is an external usb3 drive. However, what I don't understand is how projects work very smoothly when I start and as they increase in length the system slows way down....

USB 3 drives vary a lot in speed. On the low end are some 5400 rpm bus-powered portable drives. They can be quite slow. If *everything* is on such a drive (media, libraries, cache & render files, optical flow files, etc) -- is on that one drive it could be getting max'd out on bandwidth.

A few 7200 rpm portable USB 3 drives are somewhat faster but these aren't the majority. And of course USB 3 drives which are AC-powered, 3.5", 7200 rpm tend to be faster still.

Why would it start smoothly then slow down? That is how backups happen. Picture a funnel you pour water into. If you start with a trickle and gradually increase the pour rate, at first there's no backup. Then suddenly you hit the flow limit of the neck and it rapidly starts backing up.

This is only one possibility -- it could be something else. If you could run BlackMagic speed test on that hard drive it might help figure it out.

You can also use Activity Monitor or iStat Menus to determine whether the system is CPU or I/O bound during the slowdown. If CPU is high it is probably not a disk drive limitation. If CPU is low and the HDD is very busy, it could be the I/O limit.

Thank you to everyone who has responded. I am pretty sure the drive is a 7200rpm drive. I can't check it at the moment as I have decided to do a clean install of OS and FCPX. I am actually working through some of the Richard Taylor ideas as well. Thank you very much for the advice. I will work through it all. I'm concerned there may be some system issues also so am starting there and then will try to give FCP its best situation.

Some drives are made for different purposes, the RPM is just one piece of the puzzle.

I am not suggesting to do this, but all my slowdown issues seemed to have gone away after installing the Yosemite public beta on my 2013 mac pro. (Again, I'd wait till it's not beta)

So it seems like part of your problem may be fixed soon.

Yosemite hasn't been beta for a long, long time now.

Anyway I did a fresh install of Yosemite and it helped a few things but the speed of FCPX wasn't one of them. Adding RAM won't help. Buying a better machine won't help. It's just not very well programmed. But they're patching the holes so hopefully someday it will be a nice, optimized application. Maybe they need to start from scratch at line 1 again, I dunno.

www.macrumors.com/2015/03/02/os-x-yosemi...-beta-now-available/

I'm talking about 10.10.3 with the new photos app.

There has been a suspected memory leak in Mavericks and Yosemite regarding FCP X.

As far as it not being well programmed, I was able to sync and label 500 Red Dragon takes in less than 10 minutes using FCP X with Sync N Link. Can't do that in the other so called "professional' NLE's.

The feature I'm working on is Red multicam takes, before this beta I would have to restart FCP X a couple times a day and the computer at least once. Today has been so far so good.

I work with 4K ProRes4x4HQ, on some sizable projects, and I have great performance. No, there are no "memory leaks", that's just some catch phrase folks toss around in contexts it doesn't fit in.

I have read many people having the same experiences I have with UI slowdown including me. It's specific to certain mac models, just because it's not happening to you doesn't mean it's not happening.

When I had been working on this film for a few hours or so the UI starts to lag 2-3 seconds behind my keystrokes and mouse clicks.

I am working on a feature with 4000+ Red Epic clips cutting in proxy mode on a 10c 2013 Mac Pro, I can set my watch to how long I've been working on the project by when the lag starts. I restart, then it works perfectly for another few hours.

Yeah, this is same for me usually. I can normally go about 2 hours and then it slows down. Shut down and reboot and it usually works fine for a couple more. Just this time, that didn't do the trick. Hoping to have it all up and running tomorrow.

Ed, if I didn't say thank you, thank you. I am working through his list. Hope it does the trick. I'm also doing a clean OS install and also FCPX to give it every chance I can.
Thanks

The main theory points to the "unlimited undo" hogging up the ram and then virtual memory. This gets flushed when you restart FCP X.

Keep activity monitor open while you work, eventually you will see FCP X maxing out your 16GB of real memory and then start to make a huge virtual memory chunk of your hard drive

The other thing I can think of is your iMac only has USB 2.0 which is barely as fast as FW400. You want to use at the very least a FW800 RAID or a thunderbolt drive.

You are right, I'm at USB2.

Brad Parso wrote: You are right, I'm at USB2.

I cannot sufficiently stress how slow USB 2 drives can be. It's true we often get side-tracked blaming hardware issues just because they are more tangible. However in the case of a USB 2 drive with all your media and libraries, it is extremely likely that's the problem.

I think your 2011 iMac only has USB 2 ports plus Thunderbolt. A USB 3 drive will only work at USB 2 speeds, which is very slow.

Your only good option is getting a Thunderbolt drive. Here's a 3TB G-Drive Thunderbolt for $279: www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home...&Q=&is=REG&A=details

Hi Brad,
Do you have the 21" or 27" 2011 iMac?
According to MacTracker, the 21" does not have TB, but the 27" has 2 TB ports. Don't confuse the Mini-Display Port on the 21" as TB.
Both have FW800 which is faster than USB2, but slower than USB3 or TB.
If you don't have TB, then switching to FW800 will more than double your data throughput speeds. FW800 speeds are around 80Mb/s, but modern 7200rpm drives are capable of around 160Mb/s. If you have TB1, then it can handle about 4/5 disks worth of data using RAID0. Bottlenecks occur at the slowest point in a system. USB2 is definitely it in this case!

The 27" will actually support 32GB ram, but Apple claimed only 16GB.

And while it does not apply to you, not all USB3 devices support USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP). UASP is much faster than Bulk Only Transport (BOT) which is what most USB3 devices use. All Apple products that support USB3, use USAP. USAP has to be available/enabled on both sides of data stream to work, otherwise it falls back to BOT.

Hope this helps, Greg

Well, did a full OS clean install and FCPX reinstall. All is smooth as silk now. Never could narrow it down. Knew it had to be software related as it was working fine before apart from the 2 hour slow down issue. I'll see how that fairs now also. Was seeing some instability in SmartSound also. Hope that is now resolved as well. Thank you all for the input and happy editing!