LiveType SLOW.. OSX 10.5 Virtual Mem Hog Questions.

Question

First - need to vent some - Sorry. You don't have to say it - I have an older machine. -BUT- I am really confused by some of the statements I am reading about Virtual RAM usage associate with MAC apps. Many in Mac Support worlds are suggesting the age old Microsoft solution - just add more ram or a bigger drive. Horse hockey. I have programmed Windows, Unix, OSX and Linux - the real answer typically is - how many "no-ops did they program in their code to force user hardware upgrades to new systems" and how tight is their code. I'd like to believe that MAC application developers are somewhat better than those in Microsoft. To say I'm miffed isn't coming close. OKAY-Enough for venting. Lets shift to problem solving.
*The Problem At Hand.*
Am running OSX 10.5 with FinalCut Express 4.0 and Livetype (i.e. LT) 2.1.4. Attempting a test of scrolling credits of 40 seconds at DV quality (29.97 fps)-hence 1200 frames. Just text - black on wht bkgnd - no video background. No other applications running except Activity Monitor. This rendering took 6 hrs 58 min - totally unacceptable. Processing averaged 95% of total CPU cycles for both processors for nearly 7 hrs. Interesting that multithreading is occurring but not consistently across both processors - seems in most cases to promote an OR operation not an AND - whose brain child was that one. Although less than 50% of literal RAM is being totally utilized by all processes, LT consumes only 70Megs - yet also allocates and consumes 1.8Gig of Virtual - what gives? Many times, the LT process would hang showing (not responding), but would only last for 2-3 seconds before resuming, and ever so often would log statistics of shared memory to be 16,xxx,xxx.00(TB) - where the 'x's would vary but still a huge number. Any clues on that one either?
In all, my dual 1GHz processors may be arguably slower than the newer quad-core models, but lets do the math. A 32 or 64 bit architecture clocking at parallel 1GHz rates is a huge amount of bits. With a 32bit bus thats 32 Billion Bits each second (bps) or with a 64bit buss (64 B bps). As such, 1200 DV quality frames at 720x480 resolution (345.6kb ea) is 414.72Mb total. I realize that vectoring and other video mathematics need to take place –BUT- even if this adds a factor of 10x this now implies 4.1472Gb implying processing time of 0.13 seconds to process 1200 DV frames –or- half of that for a 64 bit buss – and for a single processor. Reverse engineering shows an interesting picture – 7hours of 95% dual processor utilization for a 32 bit architecture is 1532.16 Tb (at 25,200 s) implying nearly 4.4B DV frames –or- 42,000 HOURS of DV video for 7hrs of 95% processing horsepower. Something is really wrong here.
I am told by MAC support that my Video cards ALU does little for MAC video applications leaving most of the job to the CPU's - a real shame. I also do not quite know how to factor into the clocking equation RAM transfer speed for PC2700. Since there is so much virtual ram shifting occurring - I presume that this converts hard drive space for RAM - I have basic 100MBs transfer rates at 7200RPMs – hence another potential limiting factor.
Questions.
1. If Virtual mem is slowing this - how do I shift to actual ram within OSX10.5?
2. In LT, how does one start and stop the Inspector window? Need to shut it off or at least pause it.
3. Any thoughts toward why OSX10.5 apps take lots of virtual ram at the expense of actual ram?
4. Any thoughts to speeding up LT in general?
Thanks,
Davidpic

Answer 1

First - need to vent some - Sorry. You don't have to say it - I have an older machine. -BUT- I am really confused by some of the statements I am reading about Virtual RAM usage associate with MAC apps. Many in Mac Support worlds are suggesting the age old Microsoft solution - just add more ram or a bigger drive. Horse hockey. I have programmed Windows, Unix, OSX and Linux - the real answer typically is - how many "no-ops did they program in their code to force user hardware upgrades to new systems" and how tight is their code. I'd like to believe that MAC application developers are somewhat better than those in Microsoft. To say I'm miffed isn't coming close. OKAY-Enough for venting. Lets shift to problem solving.
*The Problem At Hand.*
Am running OSX 10.5 with FinalCut Express 4.0 and Livetype (i.e. LT) 2.1.4. Attempting a test of scrolling credits of 40 seconds at DV quality (29.97 fps)-hence 1200 frames. Just text - black on wht bkgnd - no video background. No other applications running except Activity Monitor. This rendering took 6 hrs 58 min - totally unacceptable. Processing averaged 95% of total CPU cycles for both processors for nearly 7 hrs. Interesting that multithreading is occurring but not consistently across both processors - seems in most cases to promote an OR operation not an AND - whose brain child was that one. Although less than 50% of literal RAM is being totally utilized by all processes, LT consumes only 70Megs - yet also allocates and consumes 1.8Gig of Virtual - what gives? Many times, the LT process would hang showing (not responding), but would only last for 2-3 seconds before resuming, and ever so often would log statistics of shared memory to be 16,xxx,xxx.00(TB) - where the 'x's would vary but still a huge number. Any clues on that one either?
In all, my dual 1GHz processors may be arguably slower than the newer quad-core models, but lets do the math. A 32 or 64 bit architecture clocking at parallel 1GHz rates is a huge amount of bits. With a 32bit bus thats 32 Billion Bits each second (bps) or with a 64bit buss (64 B bps). As such, 1200 DV quality frames at 720x480 resolution (345.6kb ea) is 414.72Mb total. I realize that vectoring and other video mathematics need to take place –BUT- even if this adds a factor of 10x this now implies 4.1472Gb implying processing time of 0.13 seconds to process 1200 DV frames –or- half of that for a 64 bit buss – and for a single processor. Reverse engineering shows an interesting picture – 7hours of 95% dual processor utilization for a 32 bit architecture is 1532.16 Tb (at 25,200 s) implying nearly 4.4B DV frames –or- 42,000 HOURS of DV video for 7hrs of 95% processing horsepower. Something is really wrong here.
I am told by MAC support that my Video cards ALU does little for MAC video applications leaving most of the job to the CPU's - a real shame. I also do not quite know how to factor into the clocking equation RAM transfer speed for PC2700. Since there is so much virtual ram shifting occurring - I presume that this converts hard drive space for RAM - I have basic 100MBs transfer rates at 7200RPMs – hence another potential limiting factor.
Questions.
1. If Virtual mem is slowing this - how do I shift to actual ram within OSX10.5?
2. In LT, how does one start and stop the Inspector window? Need to shut it off or at least pause it.
3. Any thoughts toward why OSX10.5 apps take lots of virtual ram at the expense of actual ram?
4. Any thoughts to speeding up LT in general?
Thanks,
Davidpic