I'm finding my system slowly bogs down over the course of a few months on every project I do. This is with regards to opening and closing bins, project saving and coming back to the project from the desktop. Its torture and can make simple tasks unbelievably frustrating.
Today I sat down on a system we have which we've barely used since we started the project. its an old 2009 MacPro with the absolute minimum spec for MC 8.2.5. It was fast, smooth and responsive. Exactly how mine was 4 months ago. I'd forgotten what it was like to have a decent running Avid, it got me thinking.
If this low spec system could operate in the same shared project, on the same shared ISIS workspaces, with the exact same bins, there must be something which has built up on my system which is bogging it down.
I looked around at caches, but eventually I noticed that inside each users project folder (the ISIS created user folders inside a shared project) the .avp file size varied a fair bit from system to system.
On the low spec 2009 system which was working beautifully, the file was 3kb. On my system it was 328kb.
So I backed up and deleted my systems user folder from inside the shared project. When MC launched it recreated the 3 files in there (2 x settings and 1 x avp file) and low and behold my system feels brand new again.
I quit MC, replaced the 2 x settings files with the ones I had backed up, but kept the new .avp file which was about 3kb.
I can't believe the difference, its literally night and day. Looking at the original 328kb avp file, it seems this avp file is storing a history of bins which have been accessed. I'm sure it has plenty of important data within it, but is there anything which I need to be aware of, as we're now planning to do this across our systems on a regular basis as the file builds up in size. So far we've done this on two systems and they are back to working beautifully.
Note, we are not messing with the avp file at the root of the shared project, just the avp files within each connected users folder.
Also, seems like a bug. Would be better if all unnecessary data is cleared from these files on a regular basis to keep it as small as possible.
Quite interesting. Thanks for sharing. Will keep an eye on this here.
Jef
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Jef Huey
Senior Editor
Let us know if you see similar results Jef. I'm still blown away by the difference on our systems.
Hi Mark,
I just checked, on my current project and last two projects, all 100-130min features with around 55 shooting days, the .avp in the user folder is 100-105KB.
Just to add info, not sure what any of it means, of course.
Thanks Job. Are these projects stored on an ISIS? If you have time, would be intersting to see if you see any gains from resetting this file. I'm still not sure if this is going to cause any issues, so might be best to copy the old .avp back over afterwards, don't want to be responsible for screwing up everyones projects!
Yes, ISIS 5K, vs 4.7.4. I trashed the .avp in my user folder. Not seeing a big improvement.
My bad, sorry. This project lives on the internal SDD, only the media files live on ISIS.
Yeah, thats where I think the problem lies. The ISIS is not able to serve this file up anything like as fast as an SSD.
We are on a Terrablock here with projects on a shared workspace, and I'm not seeing the behavior you are. But I'm also not sure our projects are as large as yours to begin with.
A quick scan of our Avid projects show all .avp files between 4-10K.
-- Kevin
Thanks Kevin. We typically have a 3000-5000 bins in our projects.
Anyone else on large shared projects where their avp files have grown to over 200-300kb? Can you see if it makes any difference for you. Like I said, its night and day for us.
Its likely this is solely related to shared projects stored on an ISIS workspace.
Have seen this be because of the bin indexing on shared storage. Might be worth turning off to verify or setting the search index locally to rule out.
-Matt M.
Thanks for this. We do keep our search databases stored locally, on SSD's, but do you think that this avp file is also storing some kind of search database related data? Have you found that turning off the indexing keeps the avp file smaller?
Many thanks.
That's a question i'm not sure I have the answer to.
Just specualtion but it could be trying to index whatever bin information is contained in the .AVP file. I'm not sure if that's how it works or not.
Etierh way you'd think the SSD's should be able to process the commands fast enough.
Would be interesting to know if there is a relationship between the search database and the avp file. I use search all the time though, so would be tough to turn it off to test. Just to be clear the search database is on the local SSD drive, the user project avp is located in the user folder, in the shared project on the ISIS shared storage workspace.
It does seem that the avp is being used to store bin references for bins I have opened though. Since resetting this file last week, its grown from 3kb to 21kb. So thats an average of 2.6kb/day. Which tallies with the 328kb mine was after 4 or so months of work.
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