Progressivly slowing timeline performance

Hey all,

I posted over at cow to zero responses and thought I'd try here.

I'm getting progressively sluggish performance on my timeline in FCP6/Leopard.

I'm not the only one:

[www.lafcpug.org]

I found that changing ANY timeline setting brings back performance and then, over time, it slows again.

meaning:

dumping render, changing timeline options, doing the above (link) gamma switch, etc.

This is happening in BOTH DV and SD 8bit, all of which is stored on fairly fast raids with plenty of room. The SD 8bit, at the moment, is cuts only. no layers, no effects whatsoever (early in the cut).

It seems like a Leopard issue, however, I never used FCP 6 in tiger.

Some Specs:

My leopard is a clean install, as is FCP (and actually the whole system)

Dual 2.5PPC
DeckLink SP
software raid external SATA box

Thanks y'all
fp

It might be a Leopard issue, though I don't know as I'm still running Tiger. I know that FCP 6 works fine in Tiger (so far).

You've probably already checked this, but have you ruled out your scratch disk? If the computer is taking too long accessing the disk, then the performance will certainly slow up.

Andy

Thanks for reply.

I would definatley think that would be a culprit, but, the DV footage is off a G-raid (way fast enough) and my SD 8bit is running off a software raid that the black magic disk speed tests report 121 read, 116 write. that should be good, yeah?

besides, 2 things:

1 - the raid has always performed amazingly with SD 8bit
2 - it's also happening on the G-raid

different media. different drives (with ample free space). same problem.

Again, here's the thing. changing ANY timeline setting get's my performance back to normal. fast and responsive. then it 'gums' up over time doing normal edits.

It's like I'm 'rebooting' FCP in a weird way. It feels like every time i dump the render cue, change a timeline feature or something the program sorta dumps some kind of 'cache' and is freed up. do i make any sense?

I know someone else posted about this (as per my link above) I'm wondering if there has been any 'solution'. Otherwise I need to revert back to Tiger, which is very doable, but a pain and wish i didn't have to.

thanks you so much for your help!
fp

Well, there are a couple of things you could try before downgrading. Since there are a lot of Leopard users who are NOT having the same problem, you could try a couple of fixes.

First, I'd dump the FCP preferences and see if that works. It's the simplest solution and if it works, you've only needed 30 seconds to do it.

If that doesn't work, I'd suggest reinstalling FCS (that is, if you upgraded after having FCP installed). It's possible that the upgrade to Leopard somehow gummed up FCP. A clean reinstallation of FCS could fix the problem.

As a second to last resort, I'd reinstall Leopard. Perhaps something went wrong in the installation.

Finally, if all else fails, then I'd say a downgrade is in order.

Andy

This is basic, but...

Check that the system prefs don't allow anything to go to sleep (or nap) ever. I worked recently on a Quad that had some sleep items on and it'd stall out from time to time for no reason.