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Stuttering, freezing, pinwheel of death
This may have been covered somewhere before, but searching for ‘stuttering playback’ is like googling the word ‘p*rn’, with an all but useless signal-to-noise ratio 😉
Dual-core 2.7Ghz G5, running FCP 6.0.5. Blackmagic decklink, Sonnet RAID card going out to a 4tb external array.
I’m not even sure how to diagnose this. No changes on my system, but FCP has started getting very sluggish, and it’s getting worse. Slow response scrubbing through the timeline, frequent skips and stutters in playback (any codec, any resolution). Occasional pinwheel of death before playback actually happens. Things that used to play fine under unlimited RT now stutter. Trashing prefernces eliminated the pinwheel of death, but that’s all.
But this is also happening when I play back in Quicktime, DVD Studio, and Compressor. I thought it was my RAID, but Disk Utility says it’s fine, and the problem happens even if I try to play an H264 QT off my system drive. A disk repair on my system drive also did nothing.
So like I say, I now don’t even know where to start, or where to look for help. Is my RAID dying? Is it bad RAM? OSX corruption? Would finally installing my Leopard upgrade have a chance of fixing it? Any advice would be helpful… other than ‘replace your Mac’, which is NOT an option for the forseeable future…
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5 Replies
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Hi Mike,
If you don’t start by optimizing your system you can never know when your issue is coming from.
Rebuilding your System and HDs directories with Diskwarrior, TechTols or so, normally improves the performance.
Get your self the “AJA System Test’ (in the KONA or ioHD drivers: https://www.aja.com) to test your HDs.
Cheers,
rafael -
How full is your RAID? Performance will degrade as it fills up. The AJA System Test will report the speed of your RAID. Also, try trashing prefs and repairing permissions after running Disk Warrior as Rafael suggests.
John
MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.1, Motion 4.0.1, Comp 3.5.1, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.1)Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN
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Thanks guys, I’ll give all those a try.
Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test gave me numbers that were all over the map – My first test gave me a read speed of 240mb/s and a write of 40 (!), but subsequent tests quickly levelled out to the more usual 185 / 185. Very strange. The RAID *is* pretty full (I’m desperately trying to finish a feature), but the performance change was pretty sudden…
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Mike,
Diskwarrior.
Check the speed before and after running it. You will see the difference.
rafael -
Well, still not sure what CAUSED the problem, or if it will be back… but a friend installed a new version of iStatPro, and we discovered that one of my two processors was just… OFF. It wasn’t doing anything, even when I ran a job in Compressor, specifically telling it to use both cores.
Then, after a couple of reboots (which I do every night anyway), it just came back, and everything works fine. For now…
Spooky.
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