Color.app: Terrible framerates with wrapped R3Ds playback...

[Cail Young]

There's no appreciable performance difference when in Single-display mode.

I knew that; it was so you can see the activity monitor while you're working.

Charles might be on to something with the framesize thing...

 

[Mel Matsuoka]

I knew that; it was so you can see the activity monitor while you're working.

Ah, that was a fun exercise though I use MenuMeters to monitor my CPU usage, so I donʻt really need to load up Activity Monitor for things like that. I thought there was some secret sauce involving the combo of AMonitor and Single-viewer mode

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Mel, when in graph mode on your AJA drive test, are you seeing any negative spikes?

You can have high sustained data rates, and yet still have performance issues if you have a bad drive in there. If you can, post a screenshot of the test.

Also, have you taken the Kona 3 out to see if there is any difference?

 

[Mel Matsuoka]

Mel, when in graph mode on your AJA drive test, are you seeing any negative spikes?

You can have high sustained data rates, and yet still have performance issues if you have a bad drive in there. If you can, post a screenshot of the test.

Huh...you may be on to something here, Steve.

Here's the AJA System Test with DMA off:

And with it on:

Looks like my overall throughput is suffering through the Kona board, and I'm getting the "negative spikes" you mentioned.

I also just noticed that I'm having similar playback issues of wrapped R3Ds in Final Cut (although nowhere near as bad as in Color...I can at least keep playback going, albeit stuttery sometimes with "Warn on dropped frames" turned off). When I disable video out of the Kona board, I dont get the dropped frame warnings in FCP.

What puzzles me is that this seemed to happen all of a sudden (or at least since 10.5.5). I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, and the Kona board is in Slot 3, x1900 in Slot 1, and Sonnet Tempo SATA card in Slot 4. as recommended by AJA's system configuration recommendations

I also notice that it takes about 3-4 minutes for my 10-drive RAID0 to mount when I turn it on in the mornings. It's always behaved that way since I got the system from our VAR, however, so I've always assumed that this is normal behavior for a software-based RAID0 config. Now I'm starting to think one of the drives is indeed going (or always was) bad.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Yeah, could be some issues there. I would suggest removing Kona card and seeing what your results are. If you are still getting negative spikes, time to investigate the drives. What drive models are in the Raid?

 

[Mel Matsuoka]

I don't know what the hell was causing the problem, but I just resorted to the nucular option and reinstalled my whole system from scratch...and now everything seems to work fine.

The funny thing is that in the process of installing the ProApps updates via Software Update, I had accidentally--to my utter horror--installed the 10.5.6 delta update. Instead of starting all over again, I downloaded and installed the 10.5.6 combo updater, and other than a wierd permissions problem that made my stripeset unreadable until I chmod/chown'ed all the folders & files on it to myself, everything seems to work fine.

Go figure. Thanks everyone for the advice!

Aloha