AE CS3 for Mac Very Long Time to Quit

[Nicholas Toth]

WOAH! We have an 8 core with 32 gigs of ram, np2 and the friggin thing takes like 3 minutes to quit. Its very annoying.

[Matt Larson]

Having the same issue here on a dual quad core with 9 GB RAM.

I have been watching the Activity Monitor when I quit and you can see it close all the instances of AE very slowly. Sometimes, the other instances seem to hang and keep using 100%+ of CPU.

Earlier today I tried turning off the render multiple frames option in the preferences and it quits much quicker (about 3 seconds). I’ve also noticed my computer feels much snappier. I’m not memory expert, but I noticed I was having hundreds of millions (litterally) of Page outs of memory. Since I turned off multiple frame render I’ve had 0.

Any comments?

[Nicholas Toth]

I think its snappier with nucleo running than the AE multiple render frames preference. The new ae functionality is great, but it has to gather its resouces right before you output or preview, but nucleo has already gathered its resources so it doesn’t have to go through 32 gigs of ram, and 8 cores. (you know, the nice “AE IS GATHERING RESOURCES, THIS MAY TAKE SOME TIME” box….)

I’m curious to hear Steve Forde’s opinion of this.

[Steve Forde]

There are differences in how multiprocessing native in AE CS3 works and NP2. The real short version is – we had to spend a year working on this issue (amongst others).

Both technologies use multiple instances of AE to render single frames, and then mux them together into a movie etc. They both consume large amounts of RAM.

Especially on Mac – there needs to be a “clean up” of RAM on shutdown. This isn’t always easy – especially with huge amounts of used RAM. We had to develop some pretty nifty code on this.

This is what causes the long shutdown. To properly purge all that RAM and return it to the system takes time. The more used RAM – the longer the shutdown can be.

BTW – all those who clamor for 64bit programs – this is the downside of it. Massive GB’s of RAM all used can make the application seem sluggish and the system slow (why bus speeds are so important on CPU and RAM). Also – all that RAM needs to be cleaned up.

We’ve worked hard to try and make it snappy and seamless – but would also keep an eye out for improvement here.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[David Jolosky]

Steve and all who posted, thanks very much. It wasn’t a matter of frustration, just confirmation that something might have been wrong with my app.

cheers all