How much more memory DO I need? to get my Mac Pro working right?

[Jim Fields]

I just picked up a Mac Pro. 2.66 ATI X1900 video card
I put a 4gb kit 4x 1gb sticks of memory in the machine. 2 on the upper riser, 2 on the bottom.
I upgraded from the imac to this and at first everything was going swell.

I am getting ECC errors on one specific stick, up to 4000, mostly under 1000, and sometimes up to 3 sticks will give me errors, but not over say 60.

Other World Computing is sending me an entirely new kit to replace this, however, when running Motion on a 1080i60 project with 15 images and some small particle emmitors, I get some serious lag time. Include me rendering an HDV timeline (unlimited RT) I really bring the machine to it's knees.

Is this the ECC errors/bad memory talking, or should I stick another 4-8gb of memory in?.

Motion should run smooth with the ATI and the 4GB at least, I would think it would run great, but instead I am getting crap, the machine is turning to the hard drive for virtual, and it is killing me. I feel like I need to reboot, then open Motion, work on it for 20 minutes, reboot, rinse and repeat.

Image sizes are 864x1080 and I am working in 3D with only 1 camera, no lights.

Any Mac Pro users have this issue?

[Dino Leone]

Originally Posted by Jim Fields

I just picked up a Mac Pro. 2.66 ATI X1900 video card
I put a 4gb kit 4x 1gb sticks of memory in the machine. 2 on the upper riser, 2 on the bottom.
I upgraded from the imac to this and at first everything was going swell.

I am getting ECC errors on one specific stick, up to 4000, mostly under 1000, and sometimes up to 3 sticks will give me errors, but not over say 60.

I think you shoudn't get more than about 4 ecc errors per month total. If you're getting more, it means a particular module has many bad bits which are getting corrected at readout using the error correction mechanism in the ECC RAM. Here's a good discussion:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=263195

Originally Posted by Jim Fields

...I get some serious lag time. Include me rendering an HDV timeline (unlimited RT) I really bring the machine to it's knees.

I find it useful to have "Activity Monitor" (/Applications/Utilities/) open. Makes it easy to see how much of your RAM is being used and when the system starts paging. As soon as it starts paging, it can get really really slow.

I'm working on a G5 with 3.5 GB RAM and I found that especially Motion is brutal with RAM useage. It will cache everything in RAM if it can. There's a preference setting that allows you to adjust how much of your total RAM it's allowed to allocate (I think it can use 4GB max, even if you have more). I'm not quite sure how it caches, but in my case Motion easily eats 1-1.5 GB RAM for just a 6sec HDV clip. In addition, Final cut consumes another 1-1.5GB (and a lot more when rendering) and you're already getting close to your total amount of RAM.

Some quick and dirty calculations to try to understand Motion RAM cache:
- 1 frame (1440x1080): 1440x1080x3 = 4.6 MB
- 1 sec (at 24fps): 4.6MB x 24 = 112 MB
- 10 secs means roughly 1.1 GB RAM just for the RAM cache.
Again, I don't know how much exactly caches - I'm guessing it's uncompressed. The calculations could be wrong, but it does seem to be in this order of magnitude judging from what Activity Monitor tells me.

So, I'm not surprised you're bringing your new Mac Pro to its knees. Those applications need a lot of RAM. I image even your super graphics card won't help if the system doesn't have enough RAM to cache everthing it needs - again, look at Activity Monitor to get an idea how things look in your case.
Best Regards,
Dino

[Jim Fields]

I watch activity Monitor. I read an article somewhere about how to read the various data, at this point I undersatnd Page in is fine, but getting page outs is VRam.
How do I understand Wired, Active, Inactive, Used, and free for daily work use?
I have no problem buying more memory, Leopard is coming out at the end of the month, I am sure 12 GB's now might not make as much of a difference than 12GB with Leopard.

I normaly dont do alot of HDV work inside of Motion, I tend to do more SD work, or smaller lower 3rds, etc. Right now, as I type this, Motion ran better on my 2.16 Core 2 Duo iMac with the cheesy Inviddia card, and 2GB memory, than the Pro with 4GB and the ATI. And to top it off, I am using the same Motion template I created for projects I am working on.

I think I will get the new Memory monday, hopefully that alone will handle the issue with ECC errors.

And correct me if I am wrong, I thought Motion was a GPU intensive program. Like Color.

[Dino Leone]

Originally Posted by Jim Fields

I watch activity Monitor. I read an article somewhere about how to read the various data, at this point I undersatnd Page in is fine, but getting page outs is VRam.
How do I understand Wired, Active, Inactive, Used, and free for daily work use?

Wired is program and data RAM that cannot be paged into virtual memory. This should normally be relatively little (less than 0.5GB).
Active is, as it says, active, in use, thus needs to be in physical RAM (but can be paged into virtual if it's not needed). This part jumps on my system up to 2 or more GB (50-70% of total) when I'm using Motion and FCP. Even Safari takes a couple 100MB when a lot of windows are open.
Inactive: has been released recently and is available for allocation. This part shrinks to near zero when I start playing in Motion or FCP.
Used: sum of wired, active and inactive.
Free: hasn't been touched or used since last boot.
With regards to daily work use: I focus on the page outs - when it goes really up (100,000s) I'll try to reboot soon (on the same day).

Originally Posted by Jim Fields

I have no problem buying more memory, Leopard is coming out at the end of the month, I am sure 12 GB's now might not make as much of a difference than 12GB with Leopard.
I normaly dont do alot of HDV work inside of Motion, I tend to do more SD work, or smaller lower 3rds, etc. Right now, as I type this, Motion ran better on my 2.16 Core 2 Duo iMac with the cheesy Inviddia card, and 2GB memory, than the Pro with 4GB and the ATI. And to top it off, I am using the same Motion template I created for projects I am working on.

This sounds like you're having serious trouble with some of your memory modules. My guess is your machine should be about twice as fast as the iMac for general use and it should fly when using Motion (because of the gpu).

Originally Posted by Jim Fields

And correct me if I am wrong, I thought Motion was a GPU intensive program. Like Color.

Yes, that's right, very much gpu-intensive. But having enough available system RAM is a precondition for your "race horse" GPU. If the system can't supply the data from RAM to the GPU, then the gpu is just sitting there, waiting for data.
Can you trace how the machine's performance relating to memory? For example. After a restart, with just using Motion, is the machine as fast as expected? Then, keeping an eye on the page outs, launch FCP and open a big enough project so it eats a nice chunk of RAM, play a bit around, switch back to Motion, is Motion still fast? How's the page out?
I don't know how your ecc errors relate to performance. I seems conceivable that a bad ram stick could affect ram performance dramatically, but you'll know about that when you get the new ram.

[Jim Fields]

Thanks for the info on how to read my ram data, I will memorize that.

Yes I do believe that even though I only have ECC errors in low numbers on 2 of 4 sticks, and high numbers on 1 stick, that it is degrading performance. However I should know this morning.

When I first fired up the Pro, regular activities ie; Safari, Entourage, etc seemed the same. The big difference I noticed came from Compressor, or loading DVD SP, and having the ability to load HD Motion templates and that they would indeed play smooth. Even loading 115 images in PS CS3 was nice and smooth, along with Expose, however now everything is just crummy. Must be all memory related issues now. Maybe 1 bad stick will ruin it for the computer after all, now that I look back on how it ran before these errors got to bad.