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Logic Background Task slow to release CPU resources


Maestro777

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I have a Project 157 measures long at 97.5 bpm. I'd say my plugins are probably equal in distribution between the Host and UAD DSP powered plugins. No latency issues, no playback problems and etc.

I've been balancing my I/O Buffer and Processing Buffer range to where I've been able to achieve what I believe to be a good balance between the 2 settings. Took me a while to discover that simply setting the buffer size to large and the I/O buffer to 1024 (the highest possible setting for both) didn't necessarily equate to better overall performance.

Seems to me if one setting is higher than the other that I run into more System Overload issues than I'd initially expected. I think b/c the I/O buffer size and the buffer range need to be set in such a way that the processing load is evenly distributed as best as possible between the 2. Which makes sense to me as I thought more about how both of those settings work together.

Anyway, now that I've got this Project running smoothly I'm noting a peculiar behavior where I can stop, start and playback just about anywhere within the Project effortlessly and Logic runs like a Champ.

But when I bounce out my mix, Logic will take about 3 minutes with a spinning ball performing some background task I suppose; before I can regain control. Is that normal? This is a fairly large project in terms of how many tracks I have but I just can't imagine what it's doing to take 3 minutes before releasing my CPU resources.

This is my CPU load with Logic idle

Project-at-Idle.png.916219e3bae41f2e8362d9aa7540e9fb.png

This is my CPU load during and after a bounce

Bounce-Completed.png.6e832f7dc36cb1b017fad2c74b20c52e.png

And it takes about 3 minutes for Logic to release the processing threads enough for the spinning ball to go away and allow me access to work within the Project again. As you can see, the hyper-threading has been about 2/3 released as in the screenshot below.

Logic-Controll-returned.png.f31cecd835f078e2f200969751ad2875.png

I can repeat this result with consistency every time.

What is Logic doing that take 3 minutes??? I've looked at the disk I/O and there is nothing outstanding happening there and it can't be flushing the file to disk b/c the file is already created a few seconds after the bounce completes.

I've also noted if I begin a bounce and then Ctrl + . after maybe 1 minute into the song that it aborts the bounce process immediately; but I again get this spinning ball  though the approximate time for the ball to abort and allow me control of the Project is probably slightly less than if I were to allow the full bounce.

So, normal? 

 

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Hmm, that shouldn't be the issue then. I'm not sure I'm reading your graphs properly - are you saying when Logic is idle, half your 16 cores are at running at 60 or 70%?

Does this bounce behaviour happen on all projects, even simple ones? Or is it just on this project, or large projects generally?

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17 minutes ago, des99 said:

Hmm, that shouldn't be the issue then. I'm not sure I'm reading your graphs properly - are you saying when Logic is idle, half your 16 cores are at running at 60 or 70%?

Does this bounce behaviour happen on all projects, even simple ones? Or is it just on this project, or large projects generally?

If you're referring to the 1st screenshot, yes. That's the same interpretation I get as well. I have 8 cores and  when Logic is idle, doing nothing; those 8 cores appear to be at around 60-70% utilization. When I playback or bounce the audio, hyper-threading fires up the other 8 Virtual Cores and they stay at around 50-60% utilized after the bounce completes.

It isn't until the threads on the virtual cores have subsided (about 3 mins.) that Logic is again responsive.

As for the behavior, I hadn't noted it for smaller projects but I believe I'm going to check that now that you mentioned it.

Another noted oddity is if I totally close out of Logic for 5 mins. or so; and then re-open Logic only the 1st 8-cores are being utilized and the other virtual cores have no activity at all. The additional 8 virtual cores only appear to remain with threads after I've been running Logic with this project.

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It seems to be happening irrelevant of the Project size with exception that if the project has little or nothing in it; then there isn't any problem. But then again, what's the point of that type of scenario when you're doing Production work.

I'm throwing the towel in on this one. Thanks for the suggestions.

After doing more searching, I see that this problem has been reported many times over and despite suggestions at every possible angle; I have yet to see where anyone has been able to identify why this happens. Relieving to know that apparently I'm not the only person to have reported it. Still.... totally frustrating.

 

Edited by Maestro777
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20 minutes ago, Maestro777 said:

It seems to be happening irrelevant of the Project size with exception that if the project has little or nothing in it;

Tried real-time bouncing a project with 16 Alchemy instances playing a looped pattern region each over 20 bars and cannot replicate your issue here.

Also, which Logic version are you using? Your sig doesn't seem to contain that info.

BTW I assume 48k is also your project's sample rate so no SRC at end of bounce is necessary either?

Edited by polanoid
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2 hours ago, polanoid said:

Tried real-time bouncing a project with 16 Alchemy instances playing a looped pattern region each over 20 bars and cannot replicate your issue here.

Also, which Logic version are you using? Your sig doesn't seem to contain that info.

BTW I assume 48k is also your project's sample rate so no SRC at end of bounce is necessary either?

Yeah, not surprising that you wouldn't be able to replicate the issue. Seems to be the norm for this type of problem unfortunately which is likely a large part of the reason no one having the issue has been able to acquire any viable solution.

I updated my sig to include Logic v. 10.7.

Project sample rate is 48k so no conversion required. I'll continue troubleshooting the problem. If I find the culprit it may likely help others who've had or seen the problem. Should I discover something it probably won't be a smoking gun solution in every scenario but at least it will be more than what I've found searching for clues.

It would be extremely helpful to have some type of insight as to what is happening behind the scenes when that spinning ball just sets for 2 to 3 minutes. E.g. logs, trace files or something. Otherwise I'm just blindly searching for clues. It's not as annoying and frustrating as the System Overload type of issues b/c I can at least get what I need. But it tacks on an additional 3 minute wait time between bounces that adds up.

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1 minute ago, des99 said:

You can look at Activity Monitor for the processes consuming CPU at the time which might give some clues...

That was the first place I looked. Wasn't really much help though b/c it showed Logic Pro consuming the highest CPU utilization (and Logic was highlighted in red as not responding); whereas there were no other processes that came close in comparison to suggest another process causing the problem.

I can see why others resorted to a force quit of Logic when it occurred. In my case; I just made the conscious decision to wait it out and see if Logic again ever became responsive and I timed out how long it took.  Thanks for the suggestion.

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8 hours ago, des99 said:

Did you do a Sample Process on the Logic process in this case? Might not tell you much, but it might give some clues possibly...

Sorry, not quite sure what you mean. What is a sample process on the Logic process and how would I go about doing that??

I have some spare partitions available so I'm going to perform a fresh installation of Monterey and Logic. It's more work than I'd initially anticipated doing but I'd really like to know if the behavior persists with the Project in the new environment or not. That should tell me something.

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