ProTools and memory leaks.

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ProTools and memory leaks.

Postby Mathieu Benoit » Sun May 30, 2010 9:38 am

Andrew, what are your experiences with this, (if any.) I was talking to a guy that uses Protools on a PC last night and apparently it was a big problem for him. Is it as common with Macs as well? Also he was using a very old version (before 7.x) that could also not. Can you give me some insight on this? From what I understanding memory leaks are usually an issue with the coding in the application. The application won't let go of the memory it was using do to one thing and then starts another, eventually you have to restart the application because all the memory is tied up.

I don't pretend to know more than that about it, but I thought it would be something I'd ask you about.
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Postby macrae11 » Sun May 30, 2010 3:19 pm

I know nothing about it, and to my knowledge I've never had that happen in 8+ years of using PT. I used to have an old PC PT rig that was crash happy, so I suppose it could have been an issue with that one, but when I upgraded, it was much more stable. On all my rigs now I have a software monitor which shows RAM usage and I've never noticed anything getting out of control. Have you seen any talk of this on the DUC? (duc.digidesign.com)
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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Mon May 31, 2010 11:16 am

This guy uses a version of PT LE that predates 7.0 and uses a PC, that's all I know. It was just something I found worth looking into.

I can't access DUC from work, but I found a google cache of a thread on DUC:

http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=240227
"Volume automation takes time. You don't got that kinda time. You could be getting naked with somebody somewhere." -Slipperman

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Postby macrae11 » Mon May 31, 2010 12:11 pm

Hmmm. Interesting thread. Seems like most of the troubles are coming from memory intensive VI's. I'm doing some testing here just to see what happens. I've loaded up a recent, fairly large session with roughly 50 tracks at 24, 88.2k with loads of plugs, and set it to run while viewing the activity monitor. Started out at about 800 MB of RAM and maxed out at 1.17 GB of real memory, and 2.3GB of Virtual Memory, whatever that means.

So I started adding VI's. I added about 20 stereo RAM intensive VI's, which severly abused the CPU in my old G5 which peaked at about 170%(I have PT capped at 180%), but the RAM usage never went above around 2GB real and 3GB Virtual. Eventually I managed to get it to crash, then restarted PT, and tried another session with some convolution verbs and VI's.

I didn't seem to get any of the creeping RAM numbers that I read about, or anything not seeming on the up and up. I was also doing all of this while running Final Cut Pro in the background, which wasn't using up much CPU, but was using about a Gig of memory. Obviously this is only relevant to my situation, but it doesn't seem to be a hugely prevalent problem, or I would think that I would have heard about it. It will be interesting to see what happens with this issue when PT eventually goes 64 bit.
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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Mon May 31, 2010 12:28 pm

I was thinking the same thing... If this was a widespread problem with PT HD, I'm sure the industry would have been out with their pitchforks a while ago.

As always though, with computer related things there can be some many different factors at play.
"Volume automation takes time. You don't got that kinda time. You could be getting naked with somebody somewhere." -Slipperman

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