after effects cs5 render freeze 12 core 64G RAM

[Darby Edelen]

[noah klersfeld] “I have a Two 2.93GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (12 cores) machine with 64G of RAM with the following preferences in AECS5:
RAM for other apps = 3G
RAM available for AE = 61G
Installed CPUs = 24
CPUs reserved for other apps = 12
RAM allocated per background CPU = 3G
Actual CPUs that will be used = 12”

I would recommend leaving at least 16GB and 4 cores available for other applications.

Horrible things can happen if you let AE go hog wild with your computer’s resources.

Other than that I would say you should try and simplify your comp as much as possible. Pre-render things and use less processor intensive effects if possible.

Darby Edelen

[Noah Klersfeld]

I would recommend leaving at least 16GB and 4 cores available for other applications.

So you would change
RAM for other apps from 3G to 16G
and how do I allow 4 cores for other apps?

[Craig Wall]

Darby’s words should be taken very seriously…even for people with elite workstations:

“Horrible things can happen if you let AE go hog wild with your computer’s resources.”

CS5 is a major step backwards for stability at this point if you don’t take all kinds of extra cautionary measures.

I have found out the hard way that the only way to get my work done is to dummy my 16 thread system down to about 4-8 working threads. It is unfortunate and I sure hope we see major improvements soon.

Life is full of funny particles.

[Noah Klersfeld]

i am installing the AE update and Encoder update.
i am increasing the RAM for other apps to 16G leaving 48G for AE.
I have 12 CPUs for other apps and 12 CPUs that will be used…should I reduce that as well?

[Kevin Camp]

you’ve got enough ram that i think 12 cores for other apps should be fine.

as you render you can watch the cpu levels in the activity monitor or task manager to see how well the cpus are working. if you are getting low levels, then that means that the cores aren’t getting enough data. that’s often not having enough ram, but it can also be that your drives aren’t fast enough to fill the ram. so you need to then look at ram usage and disk activity to see where the bottleneck is. often reducing the number of cores used by ae by increasing the cores to leave for other apps can help — kind of counter intuitive…

also, while hdv works better in ae10, you can often get better performance if you convert it to something like lossless animation or photo-jpeg or another fast encode/decode codec, particularly if you are compositing multiple clips… of course with high data rate codecs like those and several streams, you’ll need fast drives to keep up with the data demands.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Noah Klersfeld]

Thanks Kevin
Are there optimum numbers or levels I am looking for in the task manager for:

CPU Levels
RAM Usage
Disk Activity

I’m not sure I know how to interpret the information and identify a bottleneck.

[Philippe Lessard]

Try to render on your internal hardrive, we have this error at work when we try to render on our raid network.

Hope this work.

[Noah Klersfeld]

thanks I do render internally

[Kevin Camp]

really you’ll just need to look at the cpu activity meter (looks a bit like a green digital audio meter, fluctuating up and down). the higher those values the better. i wouldn’t be too concerned if the levels were around 75%, but if they are consistently bellow 50% then you probably want to start looking at the ram and/or disk.

ram settings are the easiest to deal with, you can try tweaking multiprocessing & memory settings. it should be noted that performance and these settings are really comp specific, settings that work really well for one comp may not work as well for another…. however, i’ve noticed that simply modifying the number of cores available to ae or changing the amount of ram that is allocated to each core can often effect performance quite a bit. the idea is that you want to use as many cores as you can, but have enough ram to feed them data efficiently… some comps/effects will benefit from more cores with less ram for each, while others will benefit from fewer cores with more ram… you’ve got a lot of ram, so i don’t think you’ll run into a lot of problems here.

if you are noticing poor cpu levels and the drives are very active (lots of reading/writing) then you most likely have a data bottleneck at the drive level. the only setting that has a direct effect on that within ae is the disk cache, so you might try disabling that when you see this happen — the idea is to decrease read/write activity by not having ae use the disk for caching. the os also caches to disk when it runs out of memory, so having a fair amount of ram allocated to ‘other apps’ should help reduce its need to disk cache.

in addition to those settings for a drive bottleneck, you can try to split your data up onto separate drive buses. a common way is to set ae’s cache to the main drive (internal bus) and set your media and renders on an external drive (like a sata or sas raid). the os will also cache to the internal drive, so you’ve now split the data onto two separate buses, an increased the amount of disk data that can be drawn from at any given time.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jon Bagge]

Apart from the advice already given I would recommend rendering to image files (png or jpg) if you have a very large render. That way you don’t have to re-render everything if something goes wrong.

Also if you think hard drive access is an issue make sure you’re rendering to a different drive from where your sources are.

————–
http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects