FCP seems sluggish

Hello to all,

For the past few days, when I have more than one program open, FCP seems to become sluggish. The play head in the timeline does not move while I'm playing a sequence or the video will not show in the viewer when I double click on a clip. I have to shut down other apps and restart FCP. Once I restart FCP, everything works fine up to a point. Eventually, if I open another app, especially Photoshop or Soundtrack I'll start having problems. Yesterday it happened while Photoshop was open. Today it just happened with Mail, Safari, and Palm open. My system was working fine up until a few days ago.

Suggestions?

As always, thanks in advance!

Peace,
Lisha
Dual 2.3 Ghz G5
5GB DDR SDRAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 6.0.6

Model Name: Power Mac G5
Model Identifier: PowerMac7,3
Processor Name: PowerPC G5 (3.1)
Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
Number Of CPUs: 2
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 5 GB
Bus Speed: 1.15 GHz
Boot ROM Version: 5.2.4f1

Sounds like you're running out of RAM. Pop up your Activity Monitor and check your RAM usage when you've got multiple apps open.

Thanks Jeff. Reading this article right now...

[www.atpm.com]

I use iStat Menu from iSlayer to monitor my Mac's processes on the menu bar.

[islayer.com]

One of my top 10 invaluable apps that everyone should have on their Mac not least for things like this and for monitoring all manner of other things.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

This is awesome, Ben! Thanks!

There are some instances where islayer shows FCP at 128%. Is that something I should be concerned about?

Lisha Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> There are some instances where islayer shows FCP
> at 128%. Is that something I should be concerned
> about?

There are two ways of expressing CPU utilization, total system or by CPU. Activity monitor uses both...

128% is 64% of the total available cycles (2 CPUs X 100%)