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Not using available ram…
Issue:
As I watch my activity monitor in confusion, I see that FCPx is sometimes using all available ram and sometimes (like now) using just about 1gb (of 8, with 5.46 ‘Free’) WITH background tasks running (and taking FOR EVER) The current Background task is dropping a synced clip (2 video tracks and 3 audio tracks at about 18mins a pc) into the timeline, & of course I would expect a delay, but I dont know why the program is not utilizing all available ram for the task. CPU is around 600% though..Running FCPX on
2008 Mac Pro 2.8 8core
8gbs Ram (8 1gb sticks)
ATI Radeon 2600 & NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 supporting acer 22′, 23′ & HP 19′ (3 total monitors)
OSX Snow Leopard (not Lion due to rumored issues with FCPX) -
1 Reply
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The amount of RAM that any app will use will vary all the time. I’ll wager the better the code is written, the more it releases and grabs RAM as needed too.
It’s because different tasks will use different resources in your computer. Not everything needs RAM to make it happen faster per se… it needs CPU power or it needs GPU power or even drive speeds to make it all happen faster – though drive speed to a lesser extent. It just depends on the tasks you’ve just performed, are performing and attempting to perform at the same time etc… Like in FCP 7 some of the filters used your GPU, others didn’t at all, relying on your CPU. If you loaded more sequences in the timeline window, you’d use more RAM. RAM doesn’t speed up rendering in anyway though… because it’s just a bucket to hold data in, not a processing device. It’s not doing the number crunching, it’s just feeding data to the bus extremely fast, and useing more than needed won’t help speed things up.
But it always comes down to this: You can’t have too much RAM, CPU speed, GPU power, and Drive speed. The more you have of each, you’ll see improvement where that hardware comes into play performing the task that utilizes that resource.
Jerry
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