Spinning ball (Mac) after every change to wiring

I’m building what I thought was a fairly straightforward rackspace - 12 plug ins, from Valhalla and Pure Magnetik. These are all currently bypassed. The only thing unusual that I’m doing is, I’m trying to create send-like behavior, so that I can send the output of any of the first 8 plugins to any of the inputs of the first 8 plugins. This requires quite a lot of extra mixer plugins with a lot of connections. If possible, I will attach a screenshot of how far I’ve gotten. But I’m basically dead in the water because after a certain point, the whole system started to slow down, and now, every single change I make, like adding or removing a connection, or adding or removing a plug in, anything, causes about 30 seconds of spinning ball. Obviously, I can’t continue working like this. Is this a known issue? Is there some limit on the number of connections one can use in a single rackspace? My Macbook is old (2012?), and only has 8gb of ram. I have no other apps open in mac os, expect for Firefox to send this message at the moment. The CPU usage indicator in GP says 8%. I’ve rebooted the computer and GP multiple times, to no avail. According to the Mac’s activity monitor, I am not anywhere near to maxxing out the RAM. I did some additional trouble shooting, and here’s what I’ve learned:

  1. I realized I had an older rackspace in the same gig, with some plugins and connections I had been trying out as I wrapped my head around the app. And in that rackspace (with far fewer connections), everything works fine, no delays. So, it’s not a universal problem infecting the whole gig, just that one rackspace.

  2. I duplicated the rackspace in question, to see what would happen, and the problem persisted. OK. So, I started removing connections, to see if I could find the point where the delay started to kick in. I removed all the connections from the last 2 16xchannel mixers I had connected (so, 16 in, 16 out, times 2, for a total of 64 connections), and sure enough, behaviour returned to normal, no delays. Then I started adding back in the same connections as before, one at a time. After about 30 connections, I started to get a slight delay (1 or 2 seconds) after each connection was made before I could add another. After about 32 or 33 connections, the spinning ball showed up, just a few seconds each time. After about 40 or 45 connections, the spinning ball time grew to the 30 or more seconds seen previously. So…something is going on with the number of connections being added.

  3. If it’s possible to add files here in the forum, I will also attach a screenshot of my activity monitor, and you can see that it does not APPEAR to be a RAM issue, the ram does not seem to be taxed. And as previously mentioned, the CPU monitor in GP is sitting steady at 8%. I would certainly assume that my old macbook is the most likely culprit here, but it’s not clear exactly WHY that’s the case, if the RAM and CPU are not being maxxed out. I sure would like to avoid buying a new mac if I could. I also have a more recent macbook (2017 I think) that I could test this on, although it would be a bit of a pain to install the software and plugins over there. But I’ll do that if I have to. And if possible I will attach the gig file itself.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

Processing: Test 2.gig…

That is not a general CPU monitor, it is only monitoring CPU cycles used for audio processing.

What does activity monitor show for CPU utilization?

Aha! Didn’t know that - good question. I’ll attach the screen shot. It looks like that’s the culprit - the CPU jumps to 108% (how is that possible???) when the spinning ball is happening. Then back down to 10% when the ball finishes spinning.

What setting do you have for the Graphics engine? (There are three possible settings)

that had occurred to me. i was on (the default?) of CoreGraphics Renderer, so I tried the other 2 options (Software and OpenGL?) and the results were the same.

Do you do any photography work or image processing with this computer?

No. It’s sole purpose in life is to run GP :slight_smile:

OK - I was wondering if you had a funky color profile (e.g. Slow Mac? How to Fix Mac User Interface Performance Issues)

I just checked to be sure, but I’m on the standard sRGB display

Just an idea: Will it get better if you’d lower your screen resolution?
I experienced a similar effect @work that using a relatively “weak” graphics device on a 4K display (with 4k screen resolution) had slowed down my (CAD) application in a very noticeable way.

worth a try, so I tried it. no change, same problem persists.

Hi joebot and welcome to the community! :slight_smile:

I see that you tried to upload this gig file, so here it is: Test 2.gig (765.8 KB)

I can reproduce the issue on Windows.

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“I can reproduce the issue on Windows.” - meaning, you’re seeing the same slow down as I’m getting on my Mac?

Yes, I have slowdowns. I can confirm.

My test machine is:

  • CPU: i7 @ 2.60 GHz
  • RAM: 16 GB
  • SSD: 1 TB

Same here on WIN10 / i7 @ 4Ghz / 32GB of RAM / 2x 1TB SSD
after adding another plugin ( i tried the internal audio player), GP started to be frozen for about a minute until it reacted again…

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@joebot

Can you write now? I granted you more privilege (for new users the system detects the maximum number of replies and you they need to wait 23 hours).