Logic Issue on Mac Pro with Upgraded RAM

[NoManIsland]

On the advice of various forum members, I recently upgraded my 2008 Mac Pro to 12 GB of RAM (from 4 GB), in order to solve an issue I was having with Logic. Unfortunately the issue is still present and I am wondering what to do as I've already blown my budget to fix it. I'm hoping someone here can help.

I use the Vienna Symphonic Library through ESX24 in Logic 9, on a 2008 Mac Pro (2.8 Ghz octocore). When I attempt to play back some of my compositions, Logic hits a wall with certain sections, indicating "System Overload. The audio engine was not able to process all required data in time. (-10011)" I did check System Profiler, and all the RAM is being recognized.

Is there any way to solve this without new hardware? As a side note, I was wondering how I can add more than 255 ESX24 tracks as Logic seems to cap out at that. Please let me know anything I can try.

Thanks

 

[product26]

I have found disk speeds or CPU to cause these types of errors more frequently than a lack of memory. Look in to a dedicated hard drive for your audio & sounds. Get the largest hard drive you can and partition it so that the first partition is about 30-40% of the drive Put all of your libraries on that first partition. Google around for "best hard drive partitioning practices".

monitor system usage with activity monitor or something like "istat menus"

 

[Mactrunk]

This is probably obvious and is obviously not an optimal solution....

You could bounce some of the VI tracks to audio tracks to make the load a little lighter.

I'm not sure where the bottleneck is on your system, but it sounds like you are pushing it pretty hard.
I wish you great success in getting this to work.

 

[NoManIsland]

I'm thinking I may have a solution, provided the bottleneck is my disk performance. The hard drives in my machine are setup as 1TB (Bay 1), 1TB (Bay 2), 2TB (Bay 3). I use Bay 1 for system and my instrument libraries, Bay 2 for data, and Bay 3 for Time Machine. If I erased the two 1TB drives, put them into a software RAID 0, then restored from the Time Machine backup, that should double my disk performance. The only thing about this that makes me nervous is that there will be a window during which all of my data is only on the TM drive, leaving the potential for a catastrophic failure. Also, is there any problem restoring from a backup of two drives to a single volume of twice the size?

 

[khva1380]

I'm thinking I may have a solution, provided the bottleneck is my disk performance. The hard drives in my machine are setup as 1TB (Bay 1), 1TB (Bay 2), 2TB (Bay 3). I use Bay 1 for system and my instrument libraries, Bay 2 for data, and Bay 3 for Time Machine. If I erased the two 1TB drives, put them into a software RAID 0, then restored from the Time Machine backup, that should double my disk performance. The only thing about this that makes me nervous is that there will be a window during which all of my data is only on the TM drive, leaving the potential for a catastrophic failure. Also, is there any problem restoring from a backup of two drives to a single volume of twice the size?

Hi,

Just looking at your system configuration, I think your problem may well be that your instrument libraries are on the same drive as your system files. I would move the instrument libraries away from the system drive onto a dedicated drive of some kind and see if that helps improve performance.

I think what you are suggesting doing would actually make the problem worse - you would end up with the system and data drive being the same so you would get more errors rather than less.

To be honest, in an ideal world, I would go out and purchase a fourth drive (probably smaller than 1TB) and use that as the system drive and reassign your current 1TB drive to be an audio library only drive. This would have numerous advantages (I think) when it comes to backups and updates to your system drive.

Basically any large file collections that are unlikely to change but could be accessed frequently and with high demand (such as sample libraries) should be on a dedicated drive. Otherwise, system calls to access data on the system drive will interupt calls for data for audio playback and the system will take preference causing the errors you are getting. Put your sample libraries on another drive and - hopefully - problem solved.

You could test this by putting the libraries on an external drive if you wanted - I reckon you would see a dramatic improvement in performance.

With 12 GB of RAM, you should be going great guns...

 

[NoManIsland]

Success! Thanks khva! Moving my sample library onto a dedicated drive fixed the problem

On another note, I am still wondering how to get ESX24 to run more than 255 software instruments, and am hoping some Logic expert knows how.