Serious AE problems!

[Kevin Camp]

i’ve been doing a bunch of repetitive rendering today, and you got me thinking about tweaking ram settings to compare performance…

i’m finding that for the few unique comps that i’m working with right now, increasing the number of cpus for ae (or decreasing number of cpus to leave for other apps in cs4), which decreases the ram for each cpu, is giving me better performance.

the last render had around 1gb of ram per core (12 cores for ae), and it rendered nearly 2x as fast as 3+gb per core (3 cpus for ae). note, my normal settings were around 2gb per core (6 cpus for ae)

now i would think that to always be the case, but i found it interesting to see that big of a difference by increasing the ram per core, which seemed contrary to the common belief.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

last update…

i tried decreasing and increasing the amount of ram to leave for other apps…

original setting was 3gb (i have 16gb total) and i noticed during the render that about 6 min into it i saw a performance decrease. i decreased it to 2gb and noticed the same problem but earlier (around 4 min). increase it to 6gb, and saw no performance drop during render.

also, when the performance drops occurred, disk activity increase, which i have to assume is the system running out of ram and starting to use ram disk/disk caching — note, disk cache was disabled in ae, so i know that wasn’t in play — so it makes sense that leaving more ram for the system would help.

to sum up… my best performance settings (again for this limited project, in cs4) 6gb of ram for other apps, 8 cpus for other apps (8 cpus for ae with around 1gb per cpu).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW