SpeedGrade Pins CPU even when IDLE

Question

MacBook Pro 2009, Core2Duo, GeForce 9600M GT, 8GB RAM
Start up SpeeGrade, all is normal.
Add a clip to the timeline, the CPU usage jumps to 200% (both cores) and stays there forever, until I delete the timeline.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

hherbos wrote:
Thank's - it was the RC_ChangeManager Plugin! - I removed it and there's now no notaceable CPU consumption of LR when sitting in the background.
It's really annoying that LR misses a lot of really tiny things that Adobe developers could implement them alltogether in only a some days. But no - you have to install lots of plugins, which lack of the poor LR api.
Well, the SDK is actually pretty complete, and quite powerful. Lr is a heavily threaded application, and this is exposed to some extent by the SDK. For plugin authors, this is really nice. It offers a way to make very powerful additions to Lr that don't belong in the core product, but behave as if they are.
But it means that a poorly written plugin can soak up a fair amount of resources. Note, however, that a plugin cannot totally steal all resources. There is a governor on that, so the worst you will see is this sort of problem -- annoying, maybe, but not disasterous.
And remember that the vast majority of plugins will use the tasks and threads handed to it from the application, and will never exhibit these symptoms. It is only some sorts of plugins written in a specific manner that would ever impact overall application execution profile. So, you could install many plugins and never see a change in behaviour whether 1 or 10 were enabled.  But install and run one that cycles hard on blocking activity and you will see this problem.
There is always a trade-off. Plugins make the application very flexible, but with this flexibility comes some risk. There is no perfect solution and there never will be. (Adobe could never implement all plugin behaviour everyone would want as first-class features in the core product -- this is impossible.)