Hi all, this is driving me nuts. I'll try and be as detailed as possible:

MacPro 2013, 64GB, d700, running 2018.12.15 Ultimate, Boris Continuum 2022.5

Storage is 64TB Promise Pegasus R8 connected by TB2 (averages around 800MB/s read on BM disk speed test). TB cable is on it's own bus and not sharing with anything else.

Intel Power Gadget reports normal temps around 60-70 degrees when under load. Nothing covering vents and the ambient temp is fine (air con). 

Until a day or so ago, everything was fine and playing normally. Now, all of a sudden, when trying to play back the exact same sequence (grouped - 9 cam, mostly Prores LT, 3 streams of xf-avc @ 1080, less than five mins long) the CPU usage is through the roof (over 2000%?!) and MC stutters on playback. Red lines on the timeline so it's dropping frames constantly. Completely unworkable. It will just about play it back in yellow mode, but green/yellow is a no go. 

It can play this sequence, it was playing this sequence, the hardware and the storage are more than capable of playing back this sequence and have been doing so until the other day. So what is causing this spike in CPU usage? 

Things I have tried:

Full power cycle and discharge
Rebuilt settings
Tried multiple different users and made new ones
Trashed MCStates
Tweaked all variations of Media Cache
Stopped all indexing
Re-installed MC
Gone back a version to 2018.12.14
Turned off GPU effects
Disabled all layers except the base video track with no effects on
Full render of sequence
Playlength toggle
Tried connecting storage via every TB port on the machine
Removed all unnecessary cables - just storage, keyboard, mouse and monitors
Turned off marked regions
Turned off waveforms
Created a new attic

Here is a screen grab of the Activitiy Monitor

I'm out of ideas. Anyone else dealing with this? I did find another thread with the same thing but there were no answers.

The fact that re-installing MC didn't fix it makes me think there must be something else on the system interacting with MC but as far as I know, nothing new has been installed. I even took the storage offline and played back just the offline sequence and Avid was still at 300% CPU usage?  

Seriously annoying.

Andi

I should mention this is all Avid media - no linked media involved.

I have just removed 2 sticks of RAM taking the machine from 64 to 32 and it's now playing back the groups. Anyone hazard a guess? Avid engineers have you ran across this? Is too much RAM a thing? Can someone explain how a process can use more than 100% of available resources? 

Andi 

Additional info:

Mac OS Mojave 10.14.6

Model Name: Mac Pro (Late 2013)

Model Identifier: MacPro6,1

Processor Name: 12-Core Intel Xeon E5

Processor Speed: 2.7 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 12

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 30 MB

Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled

Memory: 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Boot ROM Version: 428.0.0.0.0

SMC Version (system): 2.20f18

Illumination Version: 1.4a6

AMD FirePro D700 6 GB