Running Out Of Cpu Power, help please! Options

[anakinsrightarm]

hellooo i have a macbook pro with 1ghz ram. i run pro tools LE 7.3 and have had the issue of running out of cpu power. i get the error message "you are running out of CPU power. Remove some RTAS plug ins or increase the cpu usage limit in the playback engine dialog. (-9128)"

i am not running that many tracks (3-4) and only about 2 plug ins and i am still getting the problem.
i also increased the cpu usage limit in the playback engine dialog with no luck.

i thought it had to do with not having an external hard drive, so i picked up a glyph 050 250 gb hd. on other forums they said it didnt have to do with the hard drive, and to come here.

thanks

This post has been edited by anakinsrightarm: Wed 2 Apr 2008, 04:23

[deaconblue]

anakinsrightarm,

If you are running Leopard (Mac OS X v10.5.x) then I would first recommend 2GB of RAM. Leopard is a bit RAM hungry by comparison.

Also, how much space is left on your internal HDD? It should be between 10 - 20% of the total volume, i.e., if you have a 160GB HDD (internal), then you should have at least 32GB of drive space free. If it is less, the virtual memory swap file is being written quite a bit and can tax your CPU.

Best of luck.

peace.

[qusp74]

also 1gb is not enough memory these days the operating system will be taking up the majority of that so I recomend getting as much ram as your machine can hold. however if you upgrade your ram to say 3 or 4 gig you will need to have at least three times that amount spare on your system drive to provide scratch or (swap) disk space; with 3gig ram you will need 9gig spare on your system drive and 12gig spare for 4gig of ram. This is needed just to provide scratch for the ram, not even taking into account what the system need for its operation. Also if you are running plugs such as the more powerfull softsynths and samplers such as KONTACT that are processor hogs or plugs that need to access sample sets or wavetables you should relocate these resources to an external harddrive. Also if you have the settings for latency in your DAW too low this may be causing problems. They need to be low, but not too low; A latency of 256ms or 512ms is recommended. anything below that; eg.128ms or 64ms would require a 'Quality' audio interface rather than the onboard chipset.

This post has been edited by qusp74: Wed 2 Apr 2008, 08:24