Ableton Forum

Hi folks,
Otto has a 15" PB, OSX 10.4.3, 1GB Ram, 1.67GHz processor.
I've got a 15" PB, OSX 10.3.9, 512MB Ram, 1.33 GHz processor.

He sent me a Live Set we are going to work on together, and we were discussing it on ichat. Just out of curiosity I asked him what CPU usage he had at certain points in the track. So we were able to swap percentages as the track played. I was consistently 10% or so LOWER in CPU usage than Otto. We checked at different parts of the song, where there was a lot of processor demand and also where the demand was lighter. Same picture, I was around 10% lower in CPU usage than Otto. Does anyone have any experiences or ideas why this might be?

Open a terminal window. Type this:

top

Look for Live, and check the CPU uage. Use that for your comparisons and see what the numbers are.

telekom wrote:Hi folks,
Otto has a 15" PB, OSX 10.4.3, 1GB Ram, 1.67GHz processor.
I've got a 15" PB, OSX 10.3.9, 512MB Ram, 1.33 GHz processor.

He sent me a Live Set we are going to work on together, and we were discussing it on ichat. Just out of curiosity I asked him what CPU usage he had at certain points in the track. So we were able to swap percentages as the track played. I was consistently 10% or so LOWER in CPU usage than Otto. We checked at different parts of the song, where there was a lot of processor demand and also where the demand was lighter. Same picture, I was around 10% lower in CPU usage than Otto. Does anyone have any experiences or ideas why this might be?

bizack wrote:Open a terminal window. Type this:

top

Look for Live, and check the CPU uage. Use that for your comparisons and see what the numbers are.

yah do that also get him to check his energy saver prefs, he may not be
running his cpu at full performance.

Thanks folks, appreciate the suggestions. I think I might be going senile as I would've expected some of the energy saver prefs to make a difference... but I totally forgot about it this time. I didn't know anything about the terminal window stuff so I'll give that a go.
Thanks!

Remember also that Live is just measuring its performance, and knows nothing of what's going on outside of it (i.e. other programs, threads, etc). Pushing Live to its limits would be a better indicator.

Oh, you can find the Terminal in Applications/Utilities

If you've never used it, well, be careful. Just type:

top

and when you've foud Live and recorded the CPU usage, type:

q

which will quit top. Then exit the terminal.

Hope that helps.

telekom wrote:Thanks folks, appreciate the suggestions. I think I might be going senile as I would've expected some of the energy saver prefs to make a difference... but I totally forgot about it this time. I didn't know anything about the terminal window stuff so I'll give that a go.
Thanks!

Thanks Bizack!