Transcoding slows way down when I'm away from computer

I have a millions things that I've been transcoding, and it moves along at a decent pace during the day when I'm active on my computer, but at night it seems to come to a crawl...possibly even completely stops at times. I'm confused because my Energy Saver settings seem to be set correctly. When I wake up and go to my computer, there's a screensaver on there, but my computer's not asleep. When I check my finder, there are huge gaps in between when each file was created (FAR bigger than when I'm active on my computer).
I've attached a screenshot of my Energy Saver settings.

Without knowing which macOS version you're running, your HW setup (including docks, types of external drives, and other connected devices), it's not easy to troubleshoot this situation.

There are reports of external drives going to sleep even with Energy Saver settings similar to yours. It seems to be triggered by a lack of user activity and other things, which might fit your nighttime situation. Energy Saver settings may not affect some external devices...

I'm running Big Sur 11.7.1. FCP is version 10.6.4. My media is stored on my external SSD, which is a SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro.

A few years ago I saw issues like that apparently related to the screen saver or the Security & Privacy "lock screen" timeout. Try turning both of those off while you run the same tasks overnight and see if that makes a difference.

Gotcha, thanks for the suggestion. I'll give that a go and hopefully it does the trick.

joema wrote:

A few years ago I saw issues like that apparently related to the screen saver or the Security & Privacy "lock screen" timeout. Try turning both of those off while you run the same tasks overnight and see if that makes a difference.

Sadly this didn't make a difference

A mouse jiggler won't solve the underlying issue, but could help get you through the transcodes. www.amazon.com/Undetectable-Automatic-Si...ords=mouse%2Bjiggler

A colleague used something similar to stay logged in while doing remote updates to a database system. Seemed to work great.