MP 7,1 Estimated age of 2019 Mac Pro is *12 years 4 months*?!

[guitarman777]

Just throwing this out there. I suspect it might be the OS as others have mentioned.
Kinda surprised you are on the latest OS release being in a production environment. I would normally stay one release behind then deal with constant update hiccups and bugs, but that is just me.

Also in my experience with later OS's Apple has done something to them to lock down and protect the system, which is great an all, but I've noticed lots of pausing and delays working on simple stuff. Clearly these safety measures are impacting performance and consistency. I've just moved from Mojave to Monterey, and my system before was just fine, needed to update so I could use more up to date software.

If I were to trouble shoot this I would prepare a external drive with multiple OS's installed. Install my main applications (or the main one) into each OS and create a test job with each one. This way I could narrow down where the problem lies. Next I would start removing hardware (if possible) to see if the new upgrades are causing some interference.
It sounds like a bit of work, but I believe is a solid technique. Who knows maybe during the first initial testing the problem will reveal itself.

Either way that setup should handle your workload without issues.

Because of my work environment, I'm needing to keep my gear up to date when it comes to the OS (up to date software like you mentioned and also to keep in line with what IT needs in order to manage the machine, which is typically just helping me with troubleshooting). I never update straightaway as I need to both get clearance from IT that they're prepped & ready to manage & support all the Macs they've deployed throughout the organization but also because 3rd party developers are notoriously slow on getting their software & plugins certified on the new OS. The launch of Ventura actually saw the quickest turnaround on that, but I haven't seen any increase or decrease in performance or issues based solely on the OS.

 

[guitarman777]

Nope, this box is clearly defective in some way.

First, I would zero the boot disk & clean install a Mac OS (the only way apple really gives to sort our such things). Perhaps go back a version and use (say) a final Montery for starters. Having said this, I have had no problems with Ventura 13.4 in relation to the kinds of problems you menttion, nor for any audio of video production.

Remove all third party harware. Blow it away, install fresh OS & on the way through - Zap the PRAM & reset the VMC.

How to reset the NVRAM, PRAM, and SMC on any Mac

If you're experiencing weird glitches with your Mac, resetting the NVRAM or SMC might help. Here's how to do it.

www.macworld.com

Perhaps of note, I have noticed from time to time that the VMC reset can avoid a multitude of ills; in the case of the mac pro, this simply involves disconnecting the PSU for 20 secs or so. Given the large amount of hardware connected to my mac in this recording studio, I use a UPS to power the studio, and turn off the entire studio by powering down the UPS.

Then install (say) only a clean Logic Pro; no 3rd party plugs etc. Install drivers for the Quantum, but connect directly to the mac & leave out and hubs etc for now. If possible, perhaps remove the 2nd SSD - then what you have here is a 'virgin' machine or as close as possible.

So, if Logic is now performing more like it should, good. Then start to slowly install or connect other items as required; if it breaks at some point, then there's your problem. I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to make image copies of the boot disk, back it up from time to time at each change & then the last image can easily be rolled back if one of the further steps goes awry.

If the first step - clean install, Logic only, no extra hardware - still goees awry, then indeed you may need to track down a hardware problem. First places I'd look: 3rd party ram; 3rd party SSDs & I can only assume Apple's original boot disk may still be there given that these were not upgradable. In which case, mac os should be booting from that original disk.

Still, this does 'feel' like a software /OS thing.

I'll have to figure out if "backdating" to Monterey will work within my current workflow. As I've mentioned in a couple other replies, the performance & issues I've experienced have been consistent from version to version of macOS; no discernible increase or decrease based on version.

The original boot disk is still on the machine, but I don't use it because it's only 256GB and won't fit the amount of software & such I need to install on the boot drive, unless there's a method I'm not aware of that will help with that. I've had to pop into it occasionally, and I even set up a Boot Camp partition on it as I had some work that required Windows. Otherwise, that drive sits idle and out of the way.

 

[rm5]

@guitarman777, I understand it's encouraged to update to the latest OS, but does the IT dept. actually REQUIRE you to be fully up-to-date? That doesn't sound like good management to me—usually IT support people dislike being on the newest OS, at least in my experience. I honestly made a mistake by upgrading to Ventura—I shouldn't have done it.

EDIT: Downgrading to Monterey could help, and again, I highly recommend doing it if it won't cause you trouble. I don't know what the result will be, but that's something you have to test and figure out, because I'm not in remotely the same environment as you.

 

[guitarman777]

@guitarman777, I understand it's encouraged to update to the latest OS, but does the IT dept. actually REQUIRE you to be fully up-to-date? That doesn't sound like good management to me—usually IT support people dislike being on the newest OS, at least in my experience.

EDIT: Downgrading to Monterey could help, and again, I highly recommend doing it if it won't cause you trouble. I don't know what the result will be, but that's something you have to test, because I'm not in remotely the same environment as you.

I have multiple machines that I use/manage, and for fluency of being able to access my data from multiple machines we've found that keeping everything consistent has proven far more reliable. Again, the performance issues have been present no matter what OS I've been on. I remember being very underwhelmed by how small the performance bump was when switching from the MacBook Pro to the Mac Pro when previous upgrades from MacBook Pro to MacBook Pro (the Mac Pro is my first desktop machine as I wanted to get something with horsepower).

It's hard to say if downgrading to Monterey will cause me trouble, but I'm inclined to think so. That said, I won't rule out going that route.

 

[rm5]

Again, like others have pointed out, you could have a faulty machine. There are just so many factors that go into these types of problems, and unfortunately, I'm pretty much out of ideas besides reinstalling/downgrading the OS. I wish I could be of more help, but I honestly can't think of anything else that could be causing such bad performance, especially if the OS doesn't matter in the first place.

 

[guitarman777]

Again, like others have pointed out, you could have a faulty machine. There are just so many factors that go into these types of problems, and unfortunately, I'm pretty much out of ideas besides reinstalling/downgrading the OS. I wish I could be of more help, but I honestly can't think of anything else that could be causing such bad performance, especially if the OS doesn't matter in the first place.

To be fair, I'm the freaking KING of bizarre tech issues. Nearly every one of my support calls/meetings/appointments finds the agent/technician I'm talking with saying "... Huh." at some point. On rare occasions it's an easy fix that was just something that was overlooked, but other times it's something more substantial. In multiple instances I inadvertently helped find bugs that needed squashing. I worked with Ableton for 4-6 months on a bug that was causing Ableton to crash when reaching a particular size threshold of files being transferred between projects. Murphy's Law has nothing on me. 😅😫

 

[orionquest]

Curious what was the oldest version of Mac OS you had on this machine. You mentioned not having performance issues with any version. But clearly something is up.

Do you know anyone else in the industry with a similar machine and using the same software, curious to know what their experience would be like. Does anyone rent out these kinds of Mac's?

 

[prefuse07]

Do you know anyone else in the industry with a similar machine and using the same software, curious to know what their experience would be like. Does anyone rent out these kinds of Mac's?

I mean, I can kinda answer that one...

I am running Logic Pro 10.7.8 on my 7,1 with a MOTU 8Pre USB just fine, with quite a few VSTs and plugins and my machine does not stutter one bit, I also run it at 96k, so I know that he should not be having these issues.

Furthermore, I was also running the same on my 2009 cMP without any hiccups (before I upgraded to this 7,1), so again -- owing to his system being newer than my 4,1, he should not be having any of these issues...

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Wait. First. Strip EVERYTHING out of the machine that is not stock. Strip any/all connected devices (no USB anything, no thunderbolt anything). Reset the SMC, the PRAM, nuke and pave the internal drive. Make a fresh empty account with NOTHING in it. Do NOT sign into iCloud under any circumstance. Start there.

Does it still evince that problem.

Then slowly add hardware. Is it still clean?

If so, then just sign into iCloud but bring over no data. Reboot a few times. Is it still clean?

Only after that start adding some partial data bit by bit.

The above should help you kind of binary search locate the problem. But you got to start with a system with nothing but bare stock machine components first.

No 3rd party ram. No 3rd party drives. No 3rd party cards. NOTHING plugged into USB ports....

 

[guitarman777]

Curious what was the oldest version of Mac OS you had on this machine. You mentioned not having performance issues with any version. But clearly something is up.

Do you know anyone else in the industry with a similar machine and using the same software, curious to know what their experience would be like. Does anyone rent out these kinds of Mac's?

Oldest OS version would've been Big Sur as that's what was on it when we got it, so that's what we installed on the smaller of the two SSDs we got from OWC when we made it the boot drive.

I don't personally know anyone else running this particular machine, no. But it's pretty obvious I'm going to have to do some serious troubleshooting. Even right now just typing into this text box, there are these minuscule pauses of the text actually appearing. Just watching the cursor for a few seconds, the timing isn't always consistent. And then it goes back to normal. blehhhhh

 

[guitarman777]

Wait. First. Strip EVERYTHING out of the machine that is not stock. Strip any/all connected devices (no USB anything, no thunderbolt anything). Reset the SMC, the PRAM, nuke and pave the internal drive. Make a fresh empty account with NOTHING in it. Do NOT sign into iCloud under any circumstance. Start there.

Does it still evince that problem.

Then slowly add hardware. Is it still clean?

If so, then just sign into iCloud but bring over no data. Reboot a few times. Is it still clean?

Only after that start adding some partial data bit by bit.

The above should help you kind of binary search locate the problem. But you got to start with a system with nothing but bare stock machine components first.

No 3rd party ram. No 3rd party drives. No 3rd party cards. NOTHING plugged into USB ports....

Our IT guys should still have the original RAM from this machine, so putting it back in wouldn't be an issue. That's a substantial time investment though, so we'll have to be strategic about when we do it since I currently have projects in the pipeline.

 

[chrfr]

the apparent age of the machine (which was originally built in 2019) is 12 years 4 months. Either this thing has made like Tony Stark and cracked the space-time continuum, or something is really, really wrong.

These utilities just use an algorithm to attempt to calculate the computer's age. Every 10 years, the pattern (used to) repeat. There is absolutely nothing wrong with your computer or its operating system. Obviously the computer isn't that old, but if you subtract 10 years from the estimated manufacture date, you'll be a lot closer to its actual manufacture date.
With current products, Apple has switched to random serials so these tools will no longer work.

 

[guitarman777]

I really appreciate everyone weighing in! Been chatting with my IT guys, and their initial thought is to try putting the original RAM back into the machine. We're about to power down and swap the RAM out, and we'll do some real world testing immediately thereafter. If that doesn't do it, we'll go down a combined list of troubleshooting steps they have as well as the ones you guys have shared.

WISH US LUCK

 

[ThomasJL]

RAM and SSDs were all brand new from OWC as were the PCI card modules for the SSDs. None of that tech could be anywhere near that old based on their specs.

Did you manually enable TRIM support on the OWC SSDs? If not, is macOS showing that TRIM support is enabled on the OWC SSDs?

 

[guitarman777]

Did you manually enable TRIM support on the OWC SSDs? If not, is macOS showing that TRIM support is enabled on the OWC SSDs?

Not to my knowledge. I will have to check. Standby!

EDIT: BTW, the RAM swap doesn't necessarily appear to have fixed anything. I did boot into the original SSD and install Ableton Live to see how it performs, and there's no rebuffering of audio going on when swapping between apps. Hard to say whether this is due to the stock RAM being back in the machine or to using an SSD that's more likely to have TRIM enabled.

 

[flat4]

dumb suggestion but can you try it with monterey? since you did a fresh install of ventura maybe there's something with ventura or maybe you got a bad ventura installer.

 

[orionquest]

Oldest OS version would've been Big Sur as that's what was on it when we got it, so that's what we installed on the smaller of the two SSDs we got from OWC when we made it the boot drive.

I don't personally know anyone else running this particular machine, no. But it's pretty obvious I'm going to have to do some serious troubleshooting. Even right now just typing into this text box, there are these minuscule pauses of the text actually appearing. Just watching the cursor for a few seconds, the timing isn't always consistent. And then it goes back to normal. blehhhhh

Looking up the machine it appears OS Catalina 10.15 was the original shipping OS.

These pauses is what I was talking about previously when mentioning the security Apple has implemented. Simple stuff in Photoshop like opening a basic template either open quickly or takes a few secs. It's never consistent though. This only happens in later OS, because of all these checks the system is doing on file access, and user permission etc.

I also like @ZombiePhysicist idea. You need to bring the computer back to basics. Your IT department should be able to help you with this stuff.

 

[guitarman777]

Not to my knowledge. I will have to check. Standby!

EDIT: BTW, the RAM swap doesn't necessarily appear to have fixed anything. I did boot into the original SSD and install Ableton Live to see how it performs, and there's no rebuffering of audio going on when swapping between apps. Hard to say whether this is due to the stock RAM being back in the machine or to using an SSD that's more likely to have TRIM enabled.

Took a couple minutes to find the TRIM statuses of the 3rd party SSDs as Apple changed the location of that info. (FWIW, it's under NVMExpress rather than SATA.) It shows as enabled for both of my SSDs.

 

[guitarman777]

dumb suggestion but can you try it with monterey? since you did a fresh install of ventura maybe there's something with ventura or maybe you got a bad ventura installer.

The issue has persisted no matter the OS version.

 

[guitarman777]

Looking up the machine it appears OS Catalina 10.15 was the original shipping OS.

These pauses is what I was talking about previously when mentioning the security Apple has implemented. Simple stuff in Photoshop like opening a basic template either open quickly or takes a few secs. It's never consistent though. This only happens in later OS, because of all these checks the system is doing on file access, and user permission etc.

I also like @ZombiePhysicist idea. You need to bring the computer back to basics. Your IT department should be able to help you with this stuff.

You're correct. I noticed that when I booted into the original SSD as it's still on Catalina. I downloaded & installed Ableton Live, then loaded up a project from my larger SSD that I know would have to re-buffer the audio after switching between applications, and it didn't have to do it on the built-in SSD.

We did try at least part of @ZombiePhysicist 's idea by swapping the RAM back to the original. Doesn't appear to have helped anything. I also opened up the same Ableton project I opened while on the original SSD and it's having to re-buffer the samples every time I switch back to it. I haven't yet reset the PRAM or SMC, so I'll do that next.

EDIT: Technically we *did* reset the SMC as we had to remove the computer from power (and all the connected peripherals of course) in order to swap the RAM, so I'll try the PRAM reset now.

 

[Basic75]

How is the CPU temperature? Is the CPU fan working correctly? Is the CPU heatsink attached properly? Is the amount of thermal paste correct?

 

[guitarman777]

How is the CPU temperature? Is the CPU fan working correctly? Is the CPU heatsink attached properly? Is the amount of thermal paste correct?

As far as I can tell, the CPU is behaving the way it should related to all those areas. We never touched the CPU section of this tower.

I created a new Logic Pro project with 47 stereo tracks and didn't load a single plugin into the project. Sample rate for the audio files is 44.1k, so we stuck with that instead of converting the file to 48k. We also opened up Logic's CPU & disk I/O monitor to view the behavior in real time and opted to test the playback from multiple file locations: the 4TB Western Digital external HDD I use as my way-back archive drive where these audio files were being stored, and then we saved the project as brand-new to the smaller boot drive SSD, being sure to copy all the audio files into the local folder. We then moved the project to the larger data SSD to see how the computer would perform playing back these 47 stereo tracks without any plugins while pulling the files from each of these different locations.

Upon pressing the spacebar to play the track, there was a significant spike in the disk I/O. Typically around 75%, but occasionally right near 100%. Once, playback stopped automatically as there was an error of not being able to read all the data in time. Whenever we manually stopped the track, either from the spacebar or clicking the stop button, the audio wouldn't actually stop until around *half a second* later.

I've removed essentially every single component from the machine at this point including the CalDigit TS3 hub which has the following peripherals connected to it: Acer 32" monitor (for some reason it performed better being plugged in through the hub rather than directly into the stock Radeon 8GB video card in the computer, what the actual crap), iLok dongle key, 4TB USB backup drive (G Drive Technologies), and a MIDI keyboard. Currently the only peripherals associated with the computer are the mouse, hard drive, and the Thunderbolt audio interface (which I'll unplug as well momentarily). I'm going to try to run this test again stripped down to the bare minimum. The machine won't be back to 100% stock configuration just yet as I'm still running off the 2TB boot drive we installed, but it does still have the original 48GB of RAM in it that we swapped earlier.

 

[guitarman777]

Latest update: after updating the original boot drive to Ventura and installing Logic Pro and Ableton and doing testing, it appears that the issues I'm having are more likely related to the OS or potentially the SSD on which the OS is installed. We're going to have to wipe the SSD boot drive and start over, so I've got to start working on making note of what I have installed on it so I can rebuild my setup. UGH. I've done it before so I'm not afraid of it, but it's a time sink that once again came at a really inopportune time. Phew!

 

[flat4]

Latest update: after updating the original boot drive to Ventura and installing Logic Pro and Ableton and doing testing, it appears that the issues I'm having are more likely related to the OS or potentially the SSD on which the OS is installed. We're going to have to wipe the SSD boot drive and start over, so I've got to start working on making note of what I have installed on it so I can rebuild my setup. UGH. I've done it before so I'm not afraid of it, but it's a time sink that once again came at a really inopportune time. Phew!

I had something similar to what your going thru but not as complicated and definitely not production. But it turned out to be the OS even if i wiped it and started back up it would eventually do it. No matter was OS i used. Drive pass all test, even when I used the manufactures tools. It wasn't until I zeroed the drive with the manufacturers tools that the problem stopped. It baffled me as to what a good old fashion disk utility erase was was not erasing and therefore causing the issue.

 

[guitarman777]

I had something similar to what your going thru but not as complicated and definitely not production. But it turned out to be the OS even if i wiped it and started back up it would eventually do it. No matter was OS i used. Drive pass all test, even when I used the manufactures tools. It wasn't until I zeroed the drive with the manufacturers tools that the problem stopped. It baffled me as to what a good old fashion disk utility erase was was not erasing and therefore causing the issue.

Yeah, we should do a really thorough wipe of the drive to be sure we've solved it. Good call, thanks.