Is OS 10.6.6 stable with AE CS5?

[Erik Waluska]

Yeah, it seems pretty stable so far. We’ve been running 10.6.6 for several months with CS5 and haven’t noticed any significant problems. The OS itself seems to have some issues with permissions, especially on windows share servers but if you don’t have any windows servers on your network then it shouldn’t be a problem. We use After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator for the most part and I’ve never even opened Premiere on this system so I can’t vouch for its performance but the other apps seem as stable as on previous operating systems.

[Suzanne Hemphill]

Thanks so much Erik. Maybe I’ll give it a go after I clone my startup drive…

Suzanne
MaD Studio

[Craig Wall]

I don’t know what to attribute my problems to…but in the last week or so…all hell has been breaking loose with my Master Suite CS5/Mac Pro Early 2009/10.6.6 system.

I get repeated beach balls, hangs, corrupt or truncated renders.

I’ve used AE for 15 years and this is the worst it has every behaved.

If anyone has a suggestion…I’d sure welcome it.

Life is full of funny particles.

[Erik Waluska]

My work Mac is a quad-core xeon 2.66 intel, OS X 10.6.6, about the same age as yours or a little older and it only had the original 4GB of RAM installed, which worked fine with CS3 Production Premium. But when we first installed CS5 I was getting constant hang ups and the beach ball of death and just generally crappy performance. It was horrible. Several other people here with similar machines were experiencing the same problem after installing CS5. Adobe recommends 4GB per core with a 2GB per core minimum so we installed another 4GB (8GB total) and it’s been running pretty good since then, although I imagine that more RAM would be even better. I’m not sure about the corrupted renders though, that may be something else, but I suppose it could be caused by the hang ups due to lack of RAM.

[Craig Wall]

Eric, thank you for sharing your experience.

I wasn’t having many problems until the past two weeks.

I have an 8 core/16 thread system with 24 Gigs of RAM. (Mac Nehalem 2009)

I’m reserving a few of the core/threads for other applications…as well as 5 gigs of RAM for the system and other apps.

One thing I just discovered a moment ago…is that when I quit AE (which took forever) my processors were still churning with instances of AESelfLink…so something is up with those AE multiple CPU render instances getting hung up.

I had to force quit them from the Activity Monitor. I cannot help but wonder, course, if, this is related to my problems.

I will soon have 32 gigs of RAM, and I’m obviously hopeful that this resolves or helps my problems.

Life is full of funny particles.

[Jonathan Beilin]

I had bad luck with AE CS5 on 10.6.6 until I turned off the multiprocessing. Now it’s pretty stable and doesn’t lock itself up with race conditions all the time.

[Darby Edelen]

[Craig Wall] “I’m reserving a few of the core/threads for other applications…as well as 5 gigs of RAM for the system and other apps.”

I’ve found that my system will become unstable if I use more than half of the threads. Also, using more threads/render instances is not always faster as some effects/operations are more memory bound than CPU bound.

For that reason I limit my 8-core 2.66GHz Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM to only 4 simultaneous render instances and about 12-16GB of RAM.

I never have issues with AE. I even had a Cinema 4D render going in the background all day while working in AE (judge me if you must).

Darby Edelen

[Craig Wall]

Background rendering in c4d, Darby? …while simultaneously using AE? The RAM decorum police are going to hunt you down!

LOL…I did the same thing with Vue a couple of years ago when I was grinding. I’m spoiled now: I have an 8 core Mac in the back room just for rendering.

(I’m also a c4d guy here)

Life is full of funny particles.

[Craig Wall]

Jonathan…that’s a very stiff sacrifice you are making, I’d sure think, in render time.

Hopefully there’s a happy middle ground.

Life is full of funny particles.

[Jonathan Beilin]

I never said it was an optimal solution. I’ll try multi-core rendering again when the 10.6.7 or an AE update is released.