Ableton Forum

Hi,

It seems a few of us OSX users are having problems with occasional random stuttering/dropouts, especially after Live has been playing for some time.

I want to draw your attention to two possible culprits. Spotlight Indexing and Journaling. It would seem that these two "background" processes may have an effect on disk performance, so in the interests of solving the dropout problem, I'd be grateful for anyone to try out the following and report any findings, good or bad. These aren't major radical hacks or anything but hey, if it helps solve this annoying and vibe-killing problem....

First: Spotlight Indexing.

You can temporarily turn off Spotlight's background indexing of a disk volume with a shareware app called Spotless. Spotless is free to download and try out.

http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/index.php

Don't worry, you won't kill Spotlight, or lose the ability to search for files, and you can turn indexing back on, on a per-volume basis, at any time. It just stops indexing happening constantly in the background.

[pasted]
Product Description:

Spotless is a simple utility designed to enable and disable Spotlight content indexing of volumes with the click of a button.

Spotlight content indexing can cause major slow-downs on volumes that are used for backup purposes, video rendering, Photoshop scratch disks, and a wide variety of tasks that involve the transfer of large amounts of data. Spotless can effectively and indefinitely disable the indexing of volumes that you specify. Even if the volume is a removable device, the indexing status is remembered when you remount it - even on a different computer!

Simply adding volumes to Spotlight's privacy list does not achieve the same results as using Spotless. You may cause the Metadata Server to crash, and the volumes may be indexed the next time you mount them. Also, while adding volumes to the privacy list disables content indexing, it also prevents you from finding the files by name.

Spotless allows you to delete existing Spotlight indexes. This will free up the space used by the index files on volumes that are no longer being indexed. You may also delete indexes on volumes that are being indexed. This will cause Spotlight to reindex the volume - especially useful if your index becomes damaged.
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Second: Journaling.

From the Apple document here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107249

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"Journaling" is a feature that helps protect the file system against power outages or hardware component failures, reducing the need for repairs. Journaling was first introduced in Mac OS X Server 10.2.2, then to the non-server OS in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. This document explains some of the benefits of using this feature and how it works.

Journaling for the Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) file system enhances computer availability and fault resilience, which is especially noteworthy for servers. Journaling protects the integrity of the file system on Xserve and other computers using Mac OS X Server in the event of an unplanned shutdown or power failure. It also helps to maximize the uptime of servers and connected storage devices by expediting repairs to the affected volumes when the system restarts.

Journaling is a technique that helps protect the integrity of the Mac OS Extended file systems on Mac OS X volumes. It both prevents a disk from getting into an inconsistent state and expedites disk repair if the server fails.
<snip>
When Should Journaling Be Used?

Journaling is best suited for servers requiring high availability, servers containing volumes with many files, and servers containing data that is backed up at infrequent intervals (nightly, for example).

If a volume contains read-only data that is not mission-critical, it may not be necessary to turn on journaling if performance is more important than safety.

If your server contains high-bandwidth usage data files, such as large video, graphics, or audio files, you may want to weigh the benefits of using journaling against the performance needed to access your data. In most cases, the impact of journaling upon data access performance are unnoticeable to users, but its implementation may not be practical for servers where data access demands outweigh its benefits.
(emphasis added)
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Use Disk Utility to enable/disable journaling at any time. A tiny wrinkle in OSX 10.4 Tiger: in Disk Utility, the "Disable Journaling" option in the File menu is only accessable if you hold down the option key while opening the menu.

So, I'm currently giving both these strategies a try on my setup, and I'll post up the results.

Please give them a try on your system and post back here whether you notice any improvement. The more people who try this out, the more we'll be able to positively identify either of these as potential fix.

Let's try and realise the shining promise of our shiny Mac systems!

cheers,
paddy

Any luck with this yet. Just downloaded Spotless but I am afraid something might happen. Can you please give me the procedure I should take in order to get the most juice out of spotless and test it out so we are on the same chapter?

Thanks
Ofo

I've tried all of these solutions, there was no luck for me either

Thanks anyway Pitch Black

Interesting, on Apple's logic help site, they specifically recommend makign sure that journalling is enabled.

Please be aware that only if you have a real slow Mac and you're updating your disk all the time (that is not very likely if you're working on your next nr. 1 record... these solutions will make any difference...

Was going to add to this, but I think my issue is it's own topic...

djofonunez wrote:Any luck with this yet. Just downloaded Spotless but I am afraid something might happen. Can you please give me the procedure I should take in order to get the most juice out of spotless and test it out so we are on the same chapter?

Thanks
Ofo

Hi Ofo

There's no danger of Spotess doing anything dangerous by itself. It's not like one of those weird scripts that runs off meddling with stuff behind the scenes as soon as you start the app.

Boot Spotless, wait 15 seconds for the trial screen, you will be asked for your admin password. Then select the drive you want to temporarily switch off indexing for, and hit the Disable Indexing button.

That's it. When you want to turn Indexing back on, boot Spotless, select the drive, and hit the Enable Indexing button.

You can still use Spotlight to search for anything on that drive while Indexing is switched off, it will just use the last state of the index.

When you switch Indexing back on again with Spotless, It updates the index immediately. (A helpful screen tells you so.. )

cheers
paddy

Tarekith wrote:Interesting, on Apple's logic help site, they specifically recommend makign sure that journalling is enabled.

on my mbp i notice i still occasionally get the stuttering on first play of a set, i use to get it on an older pb g4... beforehand, i thought it might be due to the drive being slow, but with a 7200 rpm SATA HD it should not be a problem.

also, i've noticed the stutter occurs on midi tracks with instruments. which (IMO) points to issues other than access speed of the hard disk...

on the same machine, i run Logic Pro 7.2 with no problems whatsoever. I use Logic to mix projects with lots of audio tracks, which should put the HD under some strain, and i've never come across the stuttering.

personally, i think the problem is in live's code - and has probably existed for quite some time... i wish that when they were coding live 6 they spent more time building a solid audio back end rather than video gizmos and what nots (grr)!

thanks for the info you provided in this post (pitchblack). even if i personally doubt this will fix the issue, it is important to remind ableton of such problems. i have previously been in touch with their tech support about this, but have never got to the bottom of it.

j

hey friends! About this problem... have you tested how much memory is using Live with the Utility coming with MAC when the clicks appear? In my case it is using 800MB of 1GB, which is pretty much. That could explain the problem.

I remember when using windows and Logic, that the very same problem appeared when I loaded some enormous library of pianos and I didn't have enough memory.


T.