This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] MacPro Mid 2010 vs mid 2012 DPX Export Performance difference?

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Re: [Avid-L2] MacPro Mid 2010 vs mid 2012 DPX Export Performance difference?

Hey John,

Current MC 2019.x versions primary recommendation for Media Composer is 16GB minimum and 32 gigs recommended. Makes sense that the extra 8gb makes a difference.

I recall that on older versions of Media Composer you could run with less ram (as little as 8gb), but for high performance situations that 64GB and 96GB was previously recommended.

I am part of a user group on Facebook called MacPro Upgrades, that you may want to check out. The discuss the bleeding edge of performance on our old MacPros.

You can stuff the 2010 and 2012 dual processor machines with up to 128 GB of ram. I have that much in my machine, but I don't use it for UHD outputs.

The common wisdom is that for highest performance, that the RAM needs to be matching, and in triplets. Ideally 96GB in matched and batched 16GB sticks.

The file section in that Facebook users group has all the details.

Dave Hogan,

Burbank, CA

On Sep 7, 2019, at 8:24 PM, bigfish@pacbell.net [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Okay so I got adventurous, what better thing to do on a Saturday night at work, and the GB or extra Ram seems to be a real tipping point. I went back to 24GB and saw a ton of memory pressure and the time estimate crept up to 8.5 hours. I have nested paint effects and when it hits those it must be particularly memory taxing with an unrendered sequence. So as has been stated in this thread Ram does make a difference but I didn't know how significantly different 8GB would be.

I've read up that even though spec for MacPro 5.1 is 64GB Ram max according to OWC with Mac OS you can go up to 96GB and if running linux or windows that can be up to 128GB. Now I'm wondering how significant upping to 96GB might be on my home system. I think there are caveats to using 16GB Ram sticks like they all have to be 16GB and can't be mixed with other sizes. I'll have to look into that. That would be 6 slots worth. Hmmmm any more knowledgeable tech heads care to chime in. After all OKI Dog was closed last night on my way home from work again so I might as well just stay at work and keep testing.

---In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, <bigfish@...> wrote :

So today trying the same DPX export with the 8GB of ram added and the export estimate is 4 hours and 15 minutes and not climbing up like it was yesterday. Activity manager shows about 29.5GB or memory being used and there is no red memory pressure being displayed in activity monitor. Also the system is not laggy like it was yesterday.

So either the extra 8GB got Avid past the tipping point and or perhaps when I installed the new ram I blew out some dust and also perhaps the reseating of the CPU tray might have improved the connections to the back plane. That's just a guess but the difference is night and day, literally and figuratively.

Now I did have the computer running all night with Adobe Media Encoder exporting which took about 5 hours after I left and then the computer sat idle. Point being it wasn't shut off for an extended cool down period so that wouldn't factor in. I have a temp monitor and it shows no signs today or yesterday of particularly high temps.

If I was really adventurous I'd pull the extra Ram to check. Perhaps I will but for now I'm glad it's working like it use to. It is surprising to me that 8GB or ram could account for such a drastic difference but what do I know. On my home system with 64GB of ram activity monitor showed avid using more like 36GB ram. The home system did the export in 4.5 to 4.75 hours. The big difference is that at home my source media, DNxHRHQX was coming of a single Hitachi Deskstar 4TB HD and at work my source media is coming from a 4GB fibre connected 16 drive raid array.. I'm kinda surprised how my USB 3 dock at home does so well but the media was very contiguous as it was copied from my work media so there would be little fragmentation still pretty impressive to me.

---In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, <bigfish@...> wrote :

I had thought they had fixed the memory leak issue. It's funny I find at home Avid link will suck up 22GB of ram creeping up the longer it runs. The same doesn't happen at work it's weird. I tried running MC 2018.12.5 but for some reason it wouldn't work with the NitrisDX circa 2009, even after I installed the included DX driver. So I couldn't go to 2018.12.5 perhaps 2018.12.7 will work with the NitrisDX. It's been a lot like herding cats of late.

What's curious is this same system has done similar shows without being so laggy. I did find an extra 8GB or ram to fill out the two open slots. Can't really tell if that's made a difference yet but I guess it can't hurt.

---In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, <forshurz@...> wrote :

RAM makes a difference, 2018.12.3 has a bad memory leak, and you can run apple hardware test on your work computer (extended) which will take over an hour to complete. If you really want to test, take the 64GB from your home computer and install it on your work computer and see if that's the big difference.

On Sep 6, 2019, at 4:09 PM, John Moore bigfish@... [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

It feels like something has changed or gone south on my work computer.

Work computer mid 2010 MacPro upgraded to 12 Core 3.33GHz, 24GB ram, GTX-680, Mac OS 10.12.6, Avid MC 2018.12.3, NitrisDX circa 2009, 4Gig Fibre Atto card to Fibrenetix 16 drive chassis, Internal 3 way 4TB hitachi stripe raid.

Home computer mid 2012 MacPro 12core upgraded to 3.46 GHz, 64GB ram, GTX-680, Cyclone Microsystems Expansion chassis 1500 watt PS with 2 TitanX 12 GBvram GPUs, DNxIO, Mac OS 10.12.6, Avid MC 2018.12.3.

At work an hour and 10 minute DCI 4096_2160 sdr Rec 709 show took abut 8 hours to export a DPX. Now for the archival ungraded master that is unrendered it's bouncing around 12 to 14 hours and the whole system gets latent and virtually unusable. I tried reformating the Graid 20TB target drive with and the result did not improve much.

I then copied all the media for the project onto a single 4TB Hitachi Deskstar and took it home. Running the Hitachi drive as source and going to the same Graid as at work the time estimate is about 4hours and 15 minutes and the overall system is snappy as hell. I did notice on the work system that Avid memory use was at times slamming up to close to 22GB or ram and the red memory pressure was showing a lot of red. I've done this before on this system with an unrendered archival master and there was memory pressure indicated but the system didn't grind to a halt. Could ram make that much of a difference. I see at home Avid is using 36.85GB memory along with kernal task at 2.82GB, AvidOPFrameGeneratorApp 1.084GB and AVid DMFSupportSvc 866.9MB.

I would think at work with source media coming off a 16 drive san chassis connected through 4Gig fibre would supply data faster than a single spinning HD. At least the spinning HD isn't very fragmented. I'm wondering why the big difference between systems. I had asked for 64GB ram on the work system but they balked at investing in old tech. I don't know what else it could be. The only other thing is I replaced the Radeon 5770GPU in the work tower with a GTX-680 flashed for mac from another system. I've done a couple 4K shows since that swap without this issue and this timeline is simpler than most of the other shows.

I wonder if the ram is getting wonky or the fibre card or Gpu. Anybody got a suggestion on what a good hardware diagnostic to run.. I might have disk warrior on the system but are there some built in utilities that might check ram etc...?

John Moore Barking Trout Productions Studio City, CA bigfish@...