System Overload & How to get the best G4 Performance

Question

Okay all you Logic and OSX Gurus. I need your help. I've finally made the LOGIC leap from OS9 and have hit the SYSTEM OVERLOAD wall like many of you before me.
I've been pouring over this, and many other Forums and Blogs, for about two weeks now, and have tried many of the fixes / solutions to no avail. I estimate I'm now getting about 25% of my OS9 Logic performance from Logic in OSX.
One specific case in point is this. A four minute song sketch. No tempo changes. Four midi tracks, 6 Audio instruments and 2 EFX (1 Guitar Amp Pro, 1 Space Designer that's no even being used).
I have unsuccessfully tried to Bounce this to disc for two weeks now. The AUDIO and DISK I/O Meters barely register until the GUITAR AMP PRO track brings the AUDIO METER up to about 1/3rd usage. At various points in the Bounce the G4 will completely FREEZE, and I will have manually restart.
THINGS I HAVE TRIED, and continue to try are:
- Repairing Permissions
- Trashing Preferences
- Updating MOTU Drivers
- Changing Processor performance setting - which I cannot do BTW, because my system does not seem to support this option.
- Closing all Widgets
- Freeing up more Space on my Mac OSx startup disk (I now have 78.41 Gig available on a 114.49 Gig drive)
- Run Cocktail to clean up System logs and temporary files
- FREEZING TRACKS as a temporary 'fix'. This did nothing BTW but add more strain to the CPU and I still had about 1/3rd the usage with my GUITAR AMP Plugin (and it still crashed).
- Increased AUDIO BUFFER to 1024
So, (and I guess this is really two sides of the same question)...
1) How do I FIX this SYSTEM OVERLOAD problem, and
2) How do I "optimize" my Dual 1.25 G4 in order to get the best performance possible out of LOGIC PRO?
OTHER QUESTIONS I HAVE ARE:
- Does the G4 have the processing power needed to run LOGIC PRO?
- I'm confident adding RAM will "help" (can't hurt), but am I really dealing with a RAM Problem here or, again, can these processors really handle it?
BTW - I'm not looking for an excuse to go shopping for a Quad G5 (I mean who needs an excuse... . But, I'm really trying to determine if at the end of the day I will spend money on RAM, Hard Drives, whatever..., and then still be frustrated and end up shopping.
- Are SCSI drives a problem with Tiger / Logic? These Cheetah drives are fast (10,000 RPM), reliable, and have been great drives to record on. I'm trying to do this simple bounce to one of the Cheetahs and as I said it's just not happening.
- Does the startup volume size effect performance?
- Does the amount of free space on the start up drive effect performance?
- Firewire 400 vs 800? My sample library is on the Firewire drive, and I'm thinking this does not pull a lot on the CPU as these get loaded into memory before playing? Am I right about that? It is Firewire 400.
A long letter and a lot of questions. I thank you all in advance for any answers, guidance or direction you can give. Please also let me know if there is something I HAVEN'T asked, looked at or should be doing.
Best,
Kevin
Kevin Saunders Hayes
SYSTEM SPECS
Machine Name: Power Mac G4
Machine Model: PowerMac3,6
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (3.3)
Number Of CPUs: 2
CPU Speed: 1.25 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
L3 Cache (per CPU): 2 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.4.8f2
Logic 7.1.1 (885)
Pro Application Support 3.1
MOTU 896 - Latest drivers
2 - Seagate Cheetah 9 gig SCSI drives
1 - Oxford Firewire (Up to 400 Mb/sec) with EXS Library
G4 Duel 1.25   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

And after months of using Express, and a week of
using Logic, I hadn't had a system overload until
today. Now I'm having them all the time. It wasn't a
set up change, it wasn't running on the battery, it
wasn't running software monitoring, it's set up with
512 i/o buffer, medium processor buffer. And it
wasn't brought on by number of tracks - that's for
sure. After it started happenind and I took a break &
came back, I was sitting on my couch, Powerbook in
my lap, tapping a beat in with the onscreen
keyboard.... a SINGLE instrument, mind you. NO plugs,
no other tracks of ANY kind. And it happened.
There's a lot of great, relevant and very helpful info on this forum and it all helps and it all counts. But..... so many people are suffering this when moving up to Pro 7 from either Pro 6 or Express. One expects a change in system load when a major update comes along but more and more people are reporting that simply recording 1 or 2 tracks of audio, pure, no plug-ins or EQ is causing an overload whereas in the previous version(s) this was easily accomodated. This, you may have guessed, has happened to me as well. Are we to accept in 1 version increment (albeit a major one) there is such a massive increase in demand from hardware that you cannot record a pure no-plug-in stereo track? When going back to 6.4.3 it will happily record 8 at once, let you EQ and reverb and then do another 8 AND then another. With no troble at all.
It is pointing more and more towards fundamental flaws in the programming. Did L7 come out too soon? Are we just beta testing what is pro software? We are only on 7.1.1 and 6 went to 6.4.3 but at no stage was it this bad at the fundamentals of what the App is for. I love Logic, I really do, but I think, even with all the great help we are fighting what Apple should be addressing. Not that you can find/contact/talk to or get any sort of response from them.
I have tried but have gone back to 6.4.3 until 7.1.2 or even 7.2 appears, but I'm not paying for 7.2. My £200 upgrade from 6.4.3 is now sitting on a shelf desperately wanting to use it.