Infamous Core Audio Overload...I know, i know....

Question

I'm getting the overload in a project that I don't really think deems overloads, and it happens in the same 6 or 7 spots during the song. This is on my Intel Core Duo Mini, 2gbRAM, 30g hd space free. I am running the project off the internal drive, which is a concern, but I can't use my Liquid MIx and Lightbridge w/ a fw hd....
The "System Perfromance" meters in Logic aren't peaking until the moment the overload happens, only one of the two cores is even loaded up to 50% at any given time. The disk i/o gets up around 80-90% occassionaly, but not during several of the dropouts.
I'm running about 5 space designers on stereo busses, and about 10 channel eqs. The rest are Liquid Mix plugs.
Some dropouts will happen when only 10-15 tracks are playing, even at the start of the song, which is pretty sparse really. All in all, there are 95 tracks in the arrange page, though I've hidden a little more than half of them. At most, I would say about 25 tracks are running during the more intricate parts.
Many of the tracks are comped together and include several edits and crossfades. Is this a problem?
I've read through the many pages on this subject (cleaned up the hd, ran onyx, i have 2gb ram, etc.), but can't seem to find the answer I'm looking for.
Is there a better way to manage a session like this?
Powerbook G4 1.67 ; Intel Core Duo Mini   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   2 gigs RAM, hd24XR, UA 610, Liquid Mix, 3 Presonus Firepods

Answer 1

actually I think it's your edits that could be tipping you over the edge. in my experience with logic, once you start having an arrangement that has a lot of regions in it, and you start having a lot of cuts and crossfades, you can run into a lot more system overloads than you otherwise would. this is probably being exacerbated even more by the fact that you're using your system drive for audio now. is it really impossible to share that FW bus between your audio interface and the liquid mix in your setup? that's a pity.
anyway the other advice so far has been on the money I think. if you commit to your edited tracks by glueing them, or exporting them as one audio file, that could potentially be all you need to let your system go back to handling the tracks and plug ins without being bothered by extra disk access. you can always keep the cut up/crossfaded version there, just mute those tracks and hide them, with the unified version now on a copy of the same tracks.
also with a lot of edits and a lot of things in your audio window, the undo history can get clogged. try reducing your undo history to less steps, I think by default it is set quite high. and in your audio window, manage it so that the files you need are there, and you get rid of extra audio files that you aren't going to use in the song.
don't worry too much about what the disk access display is showing at any given time, I think it's pretty inaccurate so it's not always going to be helpful in telling you why you hit an overload at a certain point in a song. I do think that your edits are contributing to the problem, particularly due to running off of a less than ideal drive.. so try consolidating as many of those tracks as you can and see what happens. also, as was suggested here too, freeze tracks is your friend.