System Overload & How to get the best G4 Performance
2005-12-29 by kevinshayes
Okay all you Logic and OSX Gurus. I need your help. I've finally made the LOGIC leap from OS9 and have hit the SYSTEM OVERLOAD wall like many of you before me. I've been pouring over this, and many other Forums and Blogs, for about two weeks now, and have tried many of the fixes / solutions to no avail. I estimate I'm now getting about 25% of my OS9 Logic performance from Logic in OSX. One specific case in point is this. A four minute song sketch. No tempo changes. Four midi tracks, 6 Audio instruments and 2 EFX (1 Guitar Amp Pro, 1 Space Designer that's no even being used). I have unsuccessfully tried to Bounce this to disc for two weeks now. The AUDIO and DISK I/O Meters barely register until the GUITAR AMP PRO track brings the AUDIO METER up to about 1/3rd usage. At various points in the Bounce the G4 will completely FREEZE, and I will have manually restart. THINGS I HAVE TRIED, and continue to try are: - Repairing Permissions - Trashing Preferences - Updating MOTU Drivers - Changing Processor performance setting - which I cannot do BTW, because my system does not seem to support this option. - Closing all Widgets - Freeing up more Space on my Mac OSx startup disk (I now have 78.41 Gig available on a 114.49 Gig drive) - Run Cocktail to clean up System logs and temporary files - FREEZING TRACKS as a temporary 'fix'. This did nothing BTW but add more strain to the CPU and I still had about 1/3rd the usage with my GUITAR AMP Plugin (and it still crashed). - Increased AUDIO BUFFER to 1024 So, (and I guess this is really two sides of the same question)... 1) How do I FIX this SYSTEM OVERLOAD problem, and 2) How do I "optimize" my Dual 1.25 G4 in order to get the best performance possible out of LOGIC PRO? OTHER QUESTIONS I HAVE ARE: - Does the G4 have the processing power needed to run LOGIC PRO? - I'm confident adding RAM will "help" (can't hurt), but am I really dealing with a RAM Problem here or, again, can these processors really handle it? BTW - I'm not looking for an excuse to go shopping for a Quad G5 (I mean who needs an excuse... ;-). But, I'm really trying to determine if at the end of the day I will spend money on RAM, Hard Drives, whatever..., and then still be frustrated and end up shopping. - Are SCSI drives a problem with Tiger / Logic? These Cheetah drives are fast (10,000 RPM), reliable, and have been great drives to record on. I'm trying to do this simple bounce to one of the Cheetahs and as I said it's just not happening. - Does the startup volume size effect performance? - Does the amount of free space on the start up drive effect performance? - Firewire 400 vs 800? My sample library is on the Firewire drive, and I'm thinking this does not pull a lot on the CPU as these get loaded into memory before playing? Am I right about that? It is Firewire 400. A long letter and a lot of questions. I thank you all in advance for any answers, guidance or direction you can give. Please also let me know if there is something I HAVEN'T asked, looked at or should be doing. Best, Kevin --- Kevin Saunders Hayes SYSTEM SPECS Machine Name: Power Mac G4 Machine Model: PowerMac3,6 CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (3.3) Number Of CPUs: 2 CPU Speed: 1.25 GHz L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB L3 Cache (per CPU): 2 MB Memory: 1 GB Bus Speed: 167 MHz Boot ROM Version: 4.4.8f2 Logic 7.1.1 (885) Pro Application Support 3.1 MOTU 896 - Latest drivers 2 - Seagate Cheetah 9 gig SCSI drives 1 - Oxford Firewire (Up to 400 Mb/sec) with EXS Library