Avid Protools and slow session openning

TrueNAS General
1

Hello,

sorry I a newbie here at the forum, but my search to Protools found no hits, only in the old Truenas-forum which is in read-only.

I have a setup with

  • TrueNAS Server TrueNAS Core TrueNAS-13.0-U5.3
  • Hardware: Supermicro Chassis 16Cores, 256GB RAM, SSDs and 10GB NIC
  • Clients are MacOS Ventura 13.6.3
  • ProTools 23.12
  • project-size: 105GB with 15k files (the audio-files which make the trouble, 12.5GB and 11k files)
  • located on SMB-Share with AD behind it

problem:

  • when opening a ProTools session, it takes (depending on the project) a huge amount of time, to open it. On the TrueNAS I see the smbd process climbing to near 100% CPU and running for some time.
    opening the same project from local disk or AFP-Share is very fast… < 1 minute. The same project via SMB takes around 15 minutes.
  • what is interesting. Opening the folder with the audio-files in Finder is also awesome slow. But opening the same folder in terminal, is very fast… (also tried after reboot, so no caching problem)
  • it looks like ProTools and Finder are very slow, but terminal is fast, and this on SMB-Shares only.

We use the Truenas default settings for smb, no specials.Network and IO are lazy…

any Ideas, what to look, what to try?

Thanks a lot
Cheers
Ernst

2

Hello,

[solved]

ok, solution :slight_smile: - It was protools, there is a preference setting. Parallel Task Optimization. This has to be turned off :see_no_evil:

hope it helps someone

Ernst

1 Like
3

Hi Ernst. Has this pref change been working for you?

I found that turning off Parallel Task Optimization does speed up session opening, but trying to work inside a session is next to impossible. Basic functions like processing an audio suite plugin cause the Mac to grind to a halt and freeze up.