Which process kills my CPU???

Hey dear Logic Users,

is there a way to find out which process (plugin, software instrument etc.) consuming all my cpu in a running session?

My templates are big (film composing) with a lot of instances of instruments and plugins. If I start working everything is fine and fluent - but after a while (feels like accumulation) the processor load increases to insanity and I got the message "error while trying to synchronize Audio and MIDI" and 8 of my 16 cpu cores are totally freaking out, even though I am only working with 2 audio and one Midi instance i.e.

I could now start to kill every plugin and instrument one by one to find the evil one, but this will take forever and often the cpu calms down even before I finished my procedure.

So again, is there any way (like in Mac Os the Activity Monitor) to show me the usage of the single instances in a running Logic session and not only my 16 core cpu monitor?

Thanks for reading and thinking about it.

Best, Luke

No, but you should get a feel for how "heavy" certain plugins are, and you know what tracks and busses you're stacking up a lot of plugins.

Also check in your CPU activity window whether it's one core that's overlouding, or you're just maxing out your computer generally and asking too much of your CPU that it can deliver in realtime (in which case you'll need to employ resource saving measures).

No, but you should get a feel for how "heavy" certain plugins are, and you know what tracks and busses you're stacking up a lot of plugins.

Thanks des99, sure thing!

It's not about maxing out my computer, I know my plugins and instruments very well. It must be a buggy thing going on because as I said it also occurs during working with only 2 or 3 instruments. It should consume almost nothing (and usually it doesn't) in this case - but something in the template in the background causes the trouble and I can't find it.

"overlouding"

Not quite what you meant, but sounds like a useful term for the "turd on the screen" phenomenon.

This mix is somewhat overlouded:

I could now start to kill every plugin and instrument one by one to find the evil one, but this will take forever and often the cpu calms down even before I finished my procedure.

You shouldn't have to do this.

When I create a Logic project this is how everything looks, all instruments and effects loaded ready to go.

But what I do is quit Logic and then re-open that same project and this is how it looks.

This is the reason why I say you shouldn't have to go one-by-one to find the culprit.

Once you create a MIDI region or do any activity with your MIDI controller, then that track with the instrument, effects and if there's a BUS, the effects on the BUS become loaded and active.

One thing I'll point out is if you notice, the MIDI Region that I've selected, look at the Event List, there's nothing in it.

What this tells me is, Logic doesn't care about any content within the MIDI Region, only that if the MIDI Region exists. So if you have MIDI Regions like this, delete them.

You might be using the MIDI Regions with colors so you can see, cellos, violins, etc... easily with your eyes. Instead, color the tracks or the mixer channels instead.

Now, like we all do, you're going to experiment with different instruments but once they're loaded, they stay loaded within your open Logic project, it's not till you save then close Logic and re-open that project, that any tracks that don't have MIDI Regions, will stay unloaded.

Hey ValliSoftware, thanks a lot for your detailed post - very informing!

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me like this. My sessions are too big (loading time until 5-10min) so that I cannot open and close them whenever I want.

I saw your post in another forum but I thought I'd answer it here since I'm going to reference the above Logic project I created.

So someone suggested using PS in terminal but clearly that person hasn't a clue of the suggestion they made.

PS shows all the PROCESSES running along side Logic Pro X.

In the first command line, I did a "ps -ef | grep Logic" which will tell me if Logic is currently running, which it shows that.

On the next command line, I just did a "ps -ef" which will show all the processes running on my OSX along side with Logic.

Clearly not what you're looking for.

If you want to know what is currently running, but within Logic, use Activty Monitor and Sample Process it.

Sample Process is EXACTLY what you're looking for but it's not really for the faint of heart.

Now before you think this is great, notice the above Logic project I have in the background of this above picture.

In order to get accurate information of running threads in Logic, you have to run all the AU Instruments and Effects.

In my Logic project, I added MIDI Regions with MIDI notes across 32 bars and ran the project for at least one cycle, then I used Activty Monitor and Sample Process.

Now look at the orange box area, you now have more accurate detail information for what you're looking for, again, not for the faint of heart and it's EXACTLY what you're looking for.