If you are concerned about your system not having enough RAM, do not just look at the free RAM amount, but instead add up both the free and inactive RAM amounts.Īs an example, on my PowerMac G5 with 2GB RAM, upon checking Activity Monitor I have a small sliver of free memory available (~33MB). While this is beneficial to the system, it is a little deceptive when trying to determine the amount of free RAM on the system. Instead of having to load the RAM contents from the hard disk, the system will just convert the inactive RAM back to being active. The use of inactive RAM allows the system to more quickly relaunch those recently used processes, and therefore increase the speed of the system. What does this mean? Even though Activity Monitor shows a sliver of "free" memory available, this does not reflect the total amount of available RAM for use with new processes and applications. This RAM is essentially free RAM, with the exception that OS X has kept track of what has recently been loaded into it. ![]() It may have been used by a recently quit process, or by an active one that no longer needs it, and is not required for use. This is the amount that has recently been used but is no longer required. This is the current amount of memory besides wired RAM that is being used by system and user processes. This RAM cannot be written to virtual memory on the hard disk. This is the amount that must be kept active for the system to run. There are four ways that RAM is described by the system: free, wired, active, and inactive.īeing rather self-explanatory, this is the amount that has not been recently used by an application or system process. The question is whether or not this will affect performance, and what can be done about it? When looking at the System Memory pie chart in Activity Monitor, it's apparent that the "Inactive" memory segment seems to be growing. I think a similar command-line tool is called 'top'.A few users have noticed that over time the amount of free RAM on their systems seems to go down, even if the active RAM size has not changed much. I don't have an osx on me, so I can't check, but if it can't, there are other apps that can. I'm not sure Activity Monitor can display in kbs, or only in Mbs. ![]() Keeping Activity Monitor and watching it all the time might give you an idea of what's going on, or at least you could anticipate the crash, save and reset PT. See what happens each time the play is pressed. It might even turn out that opening a certain GUI (or plugin, or other process), might start slowly eating up memory (a few kb every few seconds can sum up to a lot over a couple of hours). The first time you load the Cedar GUI, it should reserve some memory, but when you close and re-open it, it should take a lot less, if at all. Try watching the Activity Monitor and playing around with your suspects. I used to make some money on programming during high-school (so, not so recently), and at that time it was usually the GUIs that leaked. ![]() Have you tried using Activity Monitor to figure out what is leaking? Has anyone here experienced this issue and figured out what may be its source?Įvery 2 1/2 hours is a PITA. Dia sessions also use a lot of re-assigns, whereas FX sessions rarely do.ĭigidesign hasn't got a clue about what the problem could be. However, dialog mixers seem to use more exotic plugins than the FX mixers do, so it may very well be another plugin, or not a plugin at all. The one plugin that seems to be common in all the Dia sessions that is absent from the FX sessions is the Cedar controller, so I'm a bit suspicious of it. My personal hunch is that a plugin is causing this, but this is pure speculation. There has been some discussion that perhaps the reason that Dia sessions have the problem and FX sessions don't is because the Dia mixers hit play many more times than FX mixers so the memory leak doesn't build up as fast in the FX sessions, but I'm not sure I buy that premise. ![]() We believe that machine control must be on for the memory leak to occur, but since the FX sessions also use machine control, that doesn't nail down the cause. I never seem to have the problem with FX sessions, even with maxed out voices and DSP usage. The problem occurs with several different mixing crews, each with different templates and mixing habits. If we boot the sessions on a different computer it still occurs. It happens on different Macs, both G5s and Intels running expanded PT HD systems, and it doesn't seem to make a difference whether we are running 7.2 7.3 or 7.4. I've been seeing an issue for the last year or so on our ICON stages where Pro Tools Dialog sessions develop a memory leak that consistently hangs the computer every 2 to 2 1/2 hours.
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