High CPU usage causing projects to be unusable after time

[areyoudizzzy]

I've been running into a lot of CPU related problems recently which cause Logic to have dropouts, distort and sometimes freeze completely.

 

The CPU meter in Logic shows several cores/threads spiking regularly at maximum and sometimes staying there, even when transport is not running, nor with much running in the project. A restart generally helps alleviate the problems for a short while but if I leave the computer on for any period of time longer than a couple of hours, the projects will start spiking again.

 

I have my buffer size at 256 and buffer range set to small as is required to use my Virus TI2 but setting these to 1024 and Large respectively doesn't seem to alleviate my problem much. I'm seeing slightly less CPU usage and fewer (but still many) dropouts but still getting error messages stating that it's unable to sync MIDI and audio or that it was unable to process in time.

 

I understand that Logic uses only one core for the currently selected track but using a dummy audio track hasn't solved my problem either. I've tried turning all plugins off in the mixer and the CPU spikes disappear. Turning only 4 instrument plugins back on (2 summing stacks one with 2 EFM1 and the other with 2 Korg M1 Legacy) with 5 effects on each (Satson, RBass, Fabfilter Pro-Q2 & Pro-C, LFOTool) makes the CPU spike again, causing dropouts.

 

I've also tried using only the onboard soundcard and no peripheral gear and this hasn't helped either.

 

A culprit I thought might be causing it is the fact that the kernel_task process has been using more CPU (6-8% on 89 threads) and RAM (900MB Real / 9GB Virtual) lately than I've seen it do before. I tried to sort this by following a guide that suggests removing a system file but that doesn't seem to have changed anything.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated as today is becoming a very frustrating and unproductive day seeing as I've had to restart the computer 5 times already just to hear what I did yesterday (it's 2.15pm here and I started at 12!)

 

Many thanks

 

Tom

 

Machine Specs:

 

iMac 11,1 2009 2.8GHz i7, 14GB RAM, 4TB custom fitted Hybrid Drive (ST4000DX001) which works perfectly for everything else.

OSX 10.9.5

Logic 10.1.1

Saffire Pro24 DSP interface

[SebastienDaigle]

Did you tried to freeze some track?

[rickenbacker360]

Do you have any background activities like "Carbonite" which are paused for 24 hours, say, and during your session, the previous day's 24-hour pause is over and Carbonite starts back up? Happens to me.

[areyoudizzzy]

Hi, sorry for the late reply.

 

I have frozen many of the tracks but without much benefit. Still getting very frequent dropouts.

 

I do have some background activities but none of which are paused, at least not on the user end, these are dropbox, BTSync, Wunderlist, LittleSnitch, Plex Media Server and Yoink. Combined, these are using around 3% of my CPU. I've turned all of these off and it does seem to have helped somewhat but still cutting out if I don't have my dummy audio track selected before starting playback.

 

Anything else you think it could be. As a side note, I noticed that audio playing back from preview in finder was distorting and breaking up too and thought it could be a problem with my firewire drivers. I've since re-installed Saffire MixControl but this hasn't helped either.

 

Any other suggestions?

 

Thanks for your tips

[Daggilarr]

I would go through the plugins one at a time to see if there is one causing undue load.