System Overload, what else can I do??

[MBJAMS]

Hi, I'm getting the System Overload error message constantly now, even with short pieces with few instruments. I use East West symphonic plug ins. My I/O buffer size is as high as it will go, I'm not using/loading many Keyswitches, the sample thing in preferences is set to Large. This didn't used to happen much. I am still using Logic 8 btw.

 

Is my computer crapping out?? Are there any other settings I can change or adjustments I can make??

 

Thanks!!

[beej]

What are Logic's performance meters telling you?

[MBJAMS]

It doesn't seem like they're maxed out, then they will spike and I'll get the message. And it's happening much more frequently

[beej]

It doesn't seem like they're maxed out, then they will spike and I'll get the message. And it's happening much more frequently

 

Which is spiking, the CPU meters (indicating your are trying to do too much in realtime for your computer to handle), or your disk meters? (indicating you're trying to load too much for your disk and disk interface to handle).

 

In the first instance, you need to reduce CPU load, deactivate plugins, freeze tracks, render intensive things to audio or split tracks with large plugin counts over multiple channels to spread the load if any given channel has too much for one processor core to handle, and optimise your audio buffer sizes (larger isn't always better).

 

In the second instance, you need to move your disk onto a faster interface (eg, USB -> FW400, FW400 -> FW800, FW800 -> eSATA etc) or remove any competition on bandwidth if other devices are also doing stuff on that bus, spread the load over multiple disks/busses, reduce the disk load like bounce audio out to stems, unfreeze tracks (frozen tracks are a larger disk load than regular audio files as they are 32-bit files), use faster disks, cut down on streaming sample useage or tweak your streaming sample settings etc etc.

 

So, find out what meters are spiking where, and isolate what's causing the spiking, then deal with it appropriately.

 

Remember, your system has finite resources - if Logic at any given point requires more than your system can deliver in real time, you need to deal with that resource issue by reducing the requirements at that point in your project.

[MBJAMS]

cool, thanks