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  • Disabled Cells, RAM Totals, and the Memory Clean App for Mac

    P
    P

    This is a reboot of a thread that did not gain traction. Here's a little more detail. 

    My Mac Pro has 24 GB. I have a metaframe load of twenty instances, all on an SSD. 

    The VSL manual states, "A powerful new feature called Disabled Cells offers disabling and enabling cells of a matrix. When a cell is disabled, all its samples are cleared from memory, while settings are kept intact. This way you may load a matrix or preset containing all possible articulations while keeping memory footprint low. Simply enable the cells as you go, when you need the additional articulations."

    So I load my metaframe with all cells disabled. 

    After the load, all cells are indeed disabled. But the Activity Monitor on my Mac says that VE Pro is holding 14.25 GB (with 4.25 Free on whole computer, with other programs running). 

    Enter a free, downloadable app called "Memory Clean."  Note the GB numbers in the following five runs of the Memory Clean program. These are run successively, without doing anything to VE Pro.

    First run:         VE Pro 14.25   Total Free  4.97

    Second Run:   VE Pro 8.99    Total Free 10.50

    Third Run:       VE Pro 2.89    Total Free 14.69 

    Fourth Run      VE Pro 1.52    Total Free 16.34

    Fifth Run         VE Pro  1.37   Total Free 16.71 

    I don't understand why VE Pro loads with cells disabled, and yet takes up so much memory. Why, outside of the program itself and the loaded settings, does a disabled VE Pro need any more RAM at all?  

    Needless to say, the goal of a large template with disabled cells is to start from the lowest possible RAM footprint and work up. And it's great to have such a full template at the ready, starting at 16.71 GB ready to load. I just don't want to run a third-party app five times to get to that starting point. 

    All thoughts welcome, with VSL's tech gurus in particular. 
  • civilization 3C
    civilization 3C
    last edited
    last edited

    @plowman said:

    Activity Monitor on my Mac says that VE Pro is holding 14.25 GB (with 4.25 Free on whole computer, with other programs running).


    I have the same thing, the blue chunk 'inactive' grows and apparently eats 'free' when I load samples anew.

    Ditch 'Memory Clean'. What I do is a simple terminal command, type the word purge and it knocks that blue chunk down to size. In a couple of seconds, maybe as long as five seconds. I think you have to have developer tools installed, at least it didn't work here before I reinstalled developer tools.

    I saw someone the other day say that this was fixed in OSX.8 but I don't know. It is a known thing for Snow Leopard and Lion, and discussed at length at Apple Communities.
  • M
    M

    I can assure you that we properly release any memory to the OS when using disabled cells, unless you have some very particular setup where samples get very fragmented in memory. What you are seeing is something OS related. I have been quite confused by the readings of the activity monitor RAM displays myself...
  • M
    M

    EDIT: I'm an idiot.  I never checked to make sure that the cells were in fact disabled. Apparently I had "Force Enabled Cells" checked in VIPro, and so VEP was loading all cells disabled then enabling them. I just ran the test agaon  and memory went from 38 GB to 21 GB. 

    Disregard.....

    ______

    I knew I wasn't crazy!

    I am experiencing the exact same thing in Windows 7. My template with all cells disabled takes up almost the same amount of RAM as when all cells are enabled. In fact it even takes a bit longer to load (aprox. +2 minutes). Enabled, 38GB. Disabled, 32 GB. Still not sure what's happening with problem #2 though. Thanks

    _________

    I've also noticed lately that my samples seem to get "dynamically" loaded and unloaded from RAM. When I first play back my song, every note just pops and clicks. Once I've played it back everything works perfectly. It's like my hard drive needs to "wake up". Then, as the day progresses, if I haven't used a sample for a long period of time, this needs to happen again. It's like the system sees that I haven't used the sample and just decides to unload it. 

    I'm using Samsung EVO 840 SSDs connected via SATAIII to the native ports on the mobo.
  • J
    J
    What are the proper settings to achieve this and how do you enable and disable individual "cells"? Are cells the same as a single inside of a "channel" inside of an instance inside of a metaframe or are cells the "channel" itself? If the latter, how many "channels" are people typically splitting instruments into? One for each articulation?