Disk is too slow? or System Overload?

Suddenly (starting last night & continuing today) I'm receiving a lot of "DISK IS SLOW or SYSTEM OVERLOAD" popups.

 

My Troubleshooting:

 

1) Changing I/O buffer size between 64 - 1024.

2) Quitting Logic, rebooting Mac, restarting Logic.

3) Opening "Disk Utility" and running "First Aid" on disk.

 

Still the problem continues.

Edited September 1, 2020 by LogicIsDoomed

All projects or just one in particular?

As of now it appears to be this one song that is doing this.

I would double-click the CPU/HD meters in the LCD display to open the resources monitor window and determine whether the issue is with the CPU or the HD?

I would double-click the CPU/HD meters in the LCD display to open the resources monitor window and determine whether the issue is with the CPU or the HD?

 

David, I did check that earlier-on and I notice that sometimes when I begin playback the HD meter bumps to the top and slowly slides downward to normal.

The CPU meter appears normal.

What you're describing for the HD is perfectly normal behavior. The hardest task is to start playback and get a bunch of audio data all at once to fill the buffers and get playback started, then work gets a bit easier for the HD to continue a playback that has already started with buffers full.

 

Perhaps use Activity Monitor then to monitor both the CPU and HD especially at the time you get the alert and determine which is the culprit?

David, the Activity Monitor is full of data which I have no idea how to make heads of tales of.

 

I believed I've pinpointed the as follows:

 

The project 18 tracks (total).

Each track contains a voice over. Some with multiple takes (ranging from 13 - 60 seconds.

There should not be any overload errors because at all times only (1) track playbacks at a time with ZERO plugins (all 17 other tracks are muted).

 

Now get this... (herein lies the source of the "DISK IS SLOW or SYSTEM OVERLOAD" popups.)

With all 18 tracks in the arrange window these " "DISK IS SLOW or SYSTEM OVERLOAD" popups" appear repeatedly and randomly.

 

However, if I remove the regions from 15, 16 or 17 of the 18 tracks the " "DISK IS SLOW or SYSTEM OVERLOAD" popups CEASE.

 

What the deal with that?

Take it from someone who tried to do too much with too little before he was finally visited by Santa Claus: you might need to bounce some tracks. This creates a new audio-only track that represents the consequence of rendering the source track(s), then mutes the sources.

 

Logic can now "concentrate on just this subset of the problem" when generating the track audio, and(!) it no longer has to do so "in real time." If it now takes 10.001 seconds to generate 10 seconds of audio, "no biggie."

 

It actually works quite well – although it does take a wee bit of planning-ahead. It's very obvious that Logic's designers anticipated that computer hardware would always fall short of artists' expectations.

MikeR.... this should not be required at all in my situation.

During my many years using Logic there have been numerous times when I've run multitrack sessions of 20 - 30 tracks playing at the same time with little or no problems like I've initially described.

one project? try importing everything into an empty project. try bouncing tracks in place (for some reason, this has fixed a few issues for me over time).

 

or... reset nvram, the smc. or boot into safe mode, open logic, quit it, reboot normally.

 

just some ideas...

After much troubleshooting I've pinpointed the problem to my hard drive.

MAybe the drive is beginning to fail (not sure).

But after moving the project to another external drive, the problem has disappeared for the last 1 hour +.

one project? try importing everything into an empty project. try bouncing tracks in place (for some reason, this has fixed a few issues for me over time).

 

or... reset nvram, the smc. or boot into safe mode, open logic, quit it, reboot normally.

 

just some ideas...

 

 

Previously I did try to import into a new empty project. No dice!

The solution I found was to move the project to another external drive.

If you're comfortable at the command line and you have RAM to spare, you can create a RAMdisk in MacOS and put your project there. A RAMdisk acts just like a disk drive, but it's not physical; the disk drive is created using your computer's working memory.

To create a 1-GB RAMdisk called 'ramdisk', enter the following commands in a Terminal window. (Change the NUMSECTORS value to the size you want; each sector is 512 bytes)

NUMSECTORS=2000000
RAMDISK=`hdiutil attach -nomount ram://$NUMSECTORS`
diskutil partitionDisk $RAMDISK 1 GPTFormat APFS 'ramdisk' '100%'

To get rid of the RAMdisk, enter the following in the same Terminal window:

diskutil eject /Volumes/ramdisk
diskutil eject $RAMDISK

The good thing about RAM disks is that they are blazingly fast. Your load time will shrink to zero. There are two big downsides, though. First, if your machine shuts down, that data is GONE. So you need to save the information regularly to a hard disk. I don't know if you'd need to close your Logic project for such a copy to be complete and correct. This risk is reduced if you have battery backup (plugged-in laptop or UPS). Second, Logic uses a lot of RAM to do its work. When you steal away enough RAM to hold your project plus some extra workspace, you might starve Logic for the memory it needs and end up counterproductive.

How can you tell if you have enough RAM to do this? Load Activity Monitor while you have your project loaded. Go to the Memory tab, and look at the box at the bottom. If the Memory Used is smaller than the Physical Memory by a few GB, you can probably spare the RAM. To make even more memory availalble, you can also look at the list of processes on the same page. Click the Memory column header to sort by how much memory everything uses, and you might find a few programs you can close that will give you a lot more available RAM (on my system, Evernote and Google Chrome Helper and Excel combine to about 6 GB, and I can usually close those while I work in LPX).

But after moving the project to another external drive, the problem has disappeared for the last 1 hour +.

 

That can happen as well: a drive starting to fail.

Just make sure the drives you use with Logic are all formatted MacOSX Extended for spinning and APFS for SSDs.

Don't use Fat32 or ExFat drives for Logic, you'll have file corruption issues.

Great advise guys. Thanks for all the tips & help!