AUHostingService fundamental GUI issue

[rasmusmarshagen]

Hi,

I've been experiencing 3rd party GUI's slightly lagging/freezing up shortly now and then (at least once a minute). And after a lot of research and troubleshooting I've finally found the culprit. It's Logics new "external plugin hosting system" (AUHostingService) that it has to use for third party plugins when running it in Native mode. This is extremely easy to reproduce and isolate. 

Try this

1. Load up a Fabfilter Pro Q 3 in an empty project. (could be any plugin really, but this one is easy to test with)

2. Create a band, grab it and drag it around.

3. Within a minute (or in some rare case up to two minutes), the graphics will hang slightly. (this is quite subtle, but very very annoying IMO,. Audio is not affected)

This is a good test because it's so clean. Just an empty project and you don't even need to press play. I've tested this in rosetta mode and it's absolutely fine. And in a bunch of other daw's in Silicon native, and it's fine there too. And in plugin-wrapper BC Patchwork, buttery smooth graphics.

I also have a M1 Macbook air (2020), with Logic 10.7.3. And it happens there too. So I'm confident that this has nothing to do with my settings or anything, but rather it's a fundamental issue with how they've implemented the AUHostingService. No problem CPU-wise, projects play butterysmooth, but these graphics hangs are driving me nuts.

Can someone please confirm this with an apple silicon computer? 

Cheers,

[des99]

Yes, it's a known thing. I've also had it in other plugin hosts too, including Audio Hijack, not just Logic.

It doesn't affect me a lot, but it certainly happens enough to be annoying.

I'm on Monterey BTW, I don't know if anything has changed regarding this behaviour on Ventura.

I don't know whether it happens to all plugins, or whether a plugin dev has to do something to improve the behaviour. I've noticed it more on some plugins than others, for instance, and it definitely doesn't happen on all my third-party plugins, only a small handful I've noticed - but I haven't done any empirical testing or anything.

Edited December 29, 2022 by des99

[rasmusmarshagen]

Interesting. It's very ironic that it's only (except for audio hijack I suppose) apple's own software that has this issue running it natively on their chips. Why can't Logic just host the plug-ins like it used too? I never had any problem with that, and the argument that Logic doesn't crash anymore makes no sense, if a plugin crashes and you click recover, it kind of re-loads all plugins up anyway, takes equally long...

Yeah agree, it's workable, but very annyoing IMO.

[des99]

15 minutes ago, rasmusmarshagen said:

Why can't Logic just host the plug-ins like it used too? I never had any problem with that, and the argument that Logic doesn't crash anymore makes no sense, if a plugin crashes and you click recover, it kind of re-loads all plugins up anyway, takes equally long...

The reason for this change is two fold - firstly, to load the plugins outside Logic's program space, so a third-party plugin crash doesn't take down Logic, the benefits of which are well understood, and is how most DAWs do it these days (or where they are going, if they don't already do this).

Secondly, it means you can run Intel-only plugins under Rosetta, when Logic is running natively, with native plugins for those that already have native versions. (The Intel-only plugins run under the system service AUHostingCompatibilityService - the Intel/Rosetta equivalent of AUHostingService).

This gives a very good, more or less seamless transition for people who are mostly running natively, but still have Intel-only third-party plugins that are taking a while to come up with native versions (or that will never be native.)

So the idea is a fine one - but whatever is causing this issue is a bug, not an inherent flaw in the idea.

It might be worth collating some data here - plugins that show the issue, plugins that don't, to see if we can build a picture of the problem areas. And I'd guess that's probably a good idea to report this behaviour to the third-party devs in the first case, because if it's not something in their own code, they can contact, and work with Apple to get the issue resolved (they will usually have a little more clout and access to Apple's developer teams than individual users.)

The Fabfilter folks are pretty responsive to things like this (they did some good iLok bug-swatting) - it might be worth asking why their plugin behaves like this, and you might get some info from them regarding the cause. (If you do, please let us know here!)

You can report it to Apple too - they will either know about it and presumably be fixing it, or possibly they'll write it off as a third-party developer issue and say it's not their problem.

Edited December 29, 2022 by des99

[rasmusmarshagen]

20 hours ago, des99 said:

The reason for this change is two fold - firstly, to load the plugins outside Logic's program space, so a third-party plugin crash doesn't take down Logic, the benefits of which are well understood, and is how most DAWs do it these days (or where they are going, if they don't already do this).

Secondly, it means you can run Intel-only plugins under Rosetta, when Logic is running natively, with native plugins for those that already have native versions. (The Intel-only plugins run under the system service AUHostingCompatibilityService - the Intel/Rosetta equivalent of AUHostingService).

This gives a very good, more or less seamless transition for people who are mostly running natively, but still have Intel-only third-party plugins that are taking a while to come up with native versions (or that will never be native.)

So the idea is a fine one - but whatever is causing this issue is a bug, not an inherent flaw in the idea.

It might be worth collating some data here - plugins that show the issue, plugins that don't, to see if we can build a picture of the problem areas. And I'd guess that's probably a good idea to report this behaviour to the third-party devs in the first case, because if it's not something in their own code, they can contact, and work with Apple to get the issue resolved (they will usually have a little more clout and access to Apple's developer teams than individual users.)

The Fabfilter folks are pretty responsive to things like this (they did some good iLok bug-swatting) - it might be worth asking why their plugin behaves like this, and you might get some info from them regarding the cause. (If you do, please let us know here!)

You can report it to Apple too - they will either know about it and presumably be fixing it, or possibly they'll write it off as a third-party developer issue and say it's not their problem.

Yeah hopefully they're aware of the problem. I will definitely report to apple and also try contacting fabfilter for example. Thanks for the reply!! 🙂

[reggaekungen]

I hate these bugs/hangs/issues, I use Apple computers, Apple software, Apple support.

The software is quite buggy, the graphics, as you mention. And it has disk errors as well, (even on ssd) sometimes) it has disk to slow on a very light project. Logic fails even on fast editing audio/midi as well.

The computers also don't live up to the specs. I have a Mac Studio 2022 Apple M1 Max, 64gb ram, In which should be a power horse. 
And my old Mac Pro from mid 2010 crushes the MS M1 Max. In stability and flow In Logic.

I've tried with the support a hundred times since i've got it, Nov 2022 (and it's not cheap), And it's amazing how little the support staff knows about Logic!!!  I just want to replace my new mac, but they say it's nothing wrong with it!!! 

I hope there will come a more stable Logic version, and with updated modern plugins.

[rAC]

@reggaekungenI’ve found Logic to be a stable powerhouse in my M1US.

Perhaps if you tell us exactly what’s the problem/s, how to trigger them. we could help you troubleshoot them here.