FCPX using all 32GB RAM during export

[Nicholas Zimmerman]

Are you on a vanilla copy of FCPX? I’ve had a few projects where as soon as I’d enable one 3rd party effect (often BCC8 which isn’t optimized for nMP) it would eat all 64GB on my machine. Other things worth attempting: Reboot, repair permissions, delete prefs, update CUDA (I’ve had weird behavior in Motion 5 when CUDA was too out of date on a rMBP), try Compressor. These are all simple maintenance type things, so please don’t take offense if you’ve already tried all of them, I’m just letting you know the troubleshooting path I’d take. If none of those work, try moving the project to a new library or exporting and importing XML into a new one, could be Library/Project corruption.

Of course, it could also be a weird Hackintosh issue. A few years ago I was running a flashed Radeon 4970 in my Mac Pro 1,1 and when Apple dropped 10.6.4 it decimated my machine. After that I’ve stuck with official products.

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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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[Robin S. kurz]

[Nicholas Zimmerman] “I’ve had weird behavior in Motion 5 when CUDA was too out of date on a rMBP”

Especially seeing that no rMBP (that I know of) even has an Nvidia GPU to begin with, I’m not sure why you’d even want a CUDA driver either way. Simply removing it could actually be an even better solution. ;-D

[Nicholas Zimmerman]

Most of the rMBP with discreet cards are Nvidia. I’ve got a Late 2013 15″ rMBP with a discreet Gefore 750M, so deleting Cuda wouldn’t be a great idea.

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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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[Robin S. kurz]

Ah. My bad. Was thinking *nMP*. But then the drivers are updated with the OS, so I’m not sure that manually updating is exactly necessary (or even recommended) on Macs with standard Nvidia GPUs. As you say yourself, that can obviously introduce unexpected performance issues/bugs. But who knows. I’ve never needed it myself for my MBPs. 😉

[Nicholas Zimmerman]

I’m not sure if CUDA gets updated by the OS updates or not. You’re 100% correct about the display drivers, but CUDA’s got it’s own set of drivers that seem to be out of date every time I check them in the System Preferences (just checked and even now they’ve got a new update up that I’m installing). The issue I was mentioning was after the latest Motion 5 update, we were working 2 up in Motion and the screens would stop updating, even when active. My buddy and I both had the same problem on our rMBPs (2012 & late 2013) and after we both updated CUDA everything worked fine. I’m not sure how much CUDA vanilla Motion actually uses, but we had a few third party plugins running too.

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NickZimmerman.net

Certified in FCPX, Logic Pro X, & Motion 5
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[Adam Chesbrough]

Thanks Nicholas and Robin. I have tried all the basics with no results:
-delete prefrs
-moving to another library, disk, project etc

Before I do anything drastic I think you are right on with removing all FCPX suites and installing only the necessary plugins. For this project the main plugins I am running are magic bullet suites and LUT utility (all of which are updated). As for CUDA, I am running a GTX670 which utilizes CUDA especially with the adobe suites, so I am going to hold onto that (but good suggestion to see what uninstalling CUDA would do and that is something that I will definitely try). There are other graphics cards kexts out there that I can try last.

As a last resort I am going to switch to a new motherboard and see if the board is what is giving me issues.

The thing that is strange is that the system flys and then starts to slow down the longer that I run FCPX. I thought it was a bluetooth issue as with the bluetooth dongle plugged in I am unable to run boot flags via USB keyboard (in order to boot to safe mode, which actually solves the problem intermittently), which got me thinking that something is wrong with the mobo since I have never seen that issue in any of my numerous hacks. These last steps are hackintosh things so will probably for a different form. The system is sandy bridge so it might all come down to the fact that I have gotten three great years out of this system and it might be time to change the mobo and CPU to haswell and beyond. Going to take an afternoon to try and figure this out though.

Chances are that the next iteration of FCPX would fix the issue, but then again it might make things even worse…

I will go through the troubleshooting steps this afternoon and report back what I find out

Thanks again all

Macbook Pro Retina: 2.6GHZ i7, 16GB RAM 1600MHz DDR3, GT 650M 1GB RAM

Hackintosh (Sandy Bridge): i5 2500, 16GB 1333MHz DDR3, Nvidia GT640 2GB RAM

OWC 4TB RAID0 (using esata)
Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 (6Gb/s)
Echo ExpressCard Pro Thunderbolt Adapter

[Robin S. kurz]

[Nicholas Zimmerman] “but CUDA’s got it’s own set of drivers that seem to be out of date every time I check them in the System Preferences (just checked and even now they’ve got a new update up that I’m installing).”

Yes, but then those are GENERAL drivers, not GPU specific (unlike the OS drivers). They are updated with any and every change to the GPU line up. Just because they need updating doesn’t mean they are necessarily relevant to your specific GPU. But hey, if it works… 🙂

[Adam Chesbrough]

So I went nuts and reinstalled everything, disabled plugins etc. The issue is with the way that the OSX is dealing with the “file cache”. Apparently mavericks got really aggressive when it comes to file cache and only releases it when it is needed. in reality the exports are only using at 5-6GB of RAM but it is not dumping the file cache. So…the RAM is available and normally this doesn’t even effect system performance. I have had FCPX crash during long exports because it seems that the os doesn’t know when to dump the RAM.

Therefore, this is certainly a problem within my personal hack or with certain drives that are installed. Im going to take this to the hackintosh boards. Thanks again for everyone’s help.

Macbook Pro Retina: 2.6GHZ i7, 16GB RAM 1600MHz DDR3, GT 650M 1GB RAM

Hackintosh (Sandy Bridge): i5 2500, 16GB 1333MHz DDR3, Nvidia GT640 2GB RAM

OWC 4TB RAID0 (using esata)
Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 (6Gb/s)
Echo ExpressCard Pro Thunderbolt Adapter