Ableton Forum

Dear all!

I don't know if it's a bug or not, but since I'm very desperate, maybe someone hear can help me or atleast tell me that I'm not alone:

I work with LIVE professionally on an Apple M2 MacBookPro (32GB RAM), macOS 15.2 + LIVE 12.3.2, and started to notice huge UI (not audio!) lags in big sessions - doesn't matter if they are old or freshly created.

It seems any "undoable" action - adding an audio effect, changing the order or just renaming a track - the whole program freezes for 10-20 seconds and I see the rainbow wheel of doom. It is important to note that this seems to be a message thread / UI thread issue - audio runs smooth, at 5%-10%! Just the UI freezes. I tried to understand the problem and notice that the problem really scales proportionally with your session.
Renaming a track in a fresh session - no problem, instant. Having a big session with dozens of tracks with many devices and clips etc - whole UI freezes for up to 30 seconds. Like it would go through the whole session to recalcuate some layout / undo managment or whatever and it takes longer and longer?
(Of course a bigger session becomes harder to handle, but this freeze even for something minor like changing a track name is unbearable).

I already tried making new clean sessions - maybe something got corrupted - but no change. Downgraded to 12.1 and 12.2, maybe a bit better, but still the same lag seems to appear. Doesn't matter if Max4Live is involved or not, really any UI action in a big session causes those lags, which make working with the program pretty much impossible. Also on restart of the app the problem seems to be better for a while, which again looks to me like internally theres some resources piling up, memory leak or whatever.

PS: Don't know if related or not, but I also see HUGE memory usage sometimes. I have an ableton session with lots of audio effects but almost no audiofiles, so just an FX-Rack, which sometimes loads 26bg of memory - I wonder where all that memory goes unless it loads hours of hours of audiomaterial internally...

If anyone else maybe knows something about this or can help me start debugging this more, that would be appreciated!

Best wishes

Is it possible to share or send an example project so I can test?

I believe it's kind of common knowledge that Live ia very inefficient with large sets. It's not a you problem. Maybe limit group nesting and racks, that's all the advice I can offer aside from hitting Ableton to optimize their software.

Sorry for the late reply everyone.. As usual the projects kept on moving and the next show was already on the horizon

So I never fully fixed the problem, but the main main culprit in this case seemed to be the included Surround Panner Pack (sorry Robert Henke!).
As wonderful as it is, many of those don't seem to cope well with big LIVE projects. I assume it is to the many live.observer objects in them, listening for changes and blocking the whole control-pipeline in the process.

So if anyone else comes across similiar problems, this fix might help (Ableton LIVE 12.3 + Max 9 , Feb 2026): I wrote my own Surround Panner in Max and exchanged the Ableton Surround Panner, the session immediatley became MUCH faster and useable again

lefu wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 25, 2026 2:13 pm

the main main culprit in this case seemed to be the included Surround Panner Pack (sorry Robert Henke!).
I wrote my own Surround Panner in Max and exchanged the Ableton Surround Panner, the session immediatley became MUCH faster and useable again

That's an interesting find. Would you take a minute to report to Support please?
(I don't think Robert specifically wrote this device, but I might be wrong).

Cypeace wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 31, 2026 10:00 am

I believe it's kind of common knowledge that Live ia very inefficient with large sets

I'm not sure about that, at least not said without context.
I'm pretty sure this would be mostly 3rd party plugins related, than a problem with Live itself. 3rd party plugins can be very badly written and introduce many issues.
Very large Sets using only native Live devices work like a charm in my experience.

[jur] wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 28, 2026 7:42 am

Cypeace wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 31, 2026 10:00 am

I believe it's kind of common knowledge that Live ia very inefficient with large sets

I'm not sure about that, at least not said without context.
I'm pretty sure this would be mostly 3rd party plugins related, than a problem with Live itself. 3rd party plugins can be very badly written and introduce many issues.
Very large Sets using only native Live devices work like a charm in my experience.

Same here : I'm using Live on a M1 pro, on stage and for studio sessions, and huge sets with plenty of groups/racks/automation are fine.
But some third party plugins can make the whole session unstable. And my experience is also that, if you except the obvious "more plugins = more CPU use", the more you add groups/racks/automations, the more you add to the CPU use.

[jur] wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 28, 2026 7:42 am

Cypeace wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 31, 2026 10:00 am

I believe it's kind of common knowledge that Live ia very inefficient with large sets

I'm not sure about that, at least not said without context.
I'm pretty sure this would be mostly 3rd party plugins related, than a problem with Live itself. 3rd party plugins can be very badly written and introduce many issues.
Very large Sets using only native Live devices work like a charm in my experience.

Let me mention this thread as a reference to UI lag in large sets
viewtopic.php?p=1834530