Qlab 3 and GO button latency/lag?

[johng...@mac.com]

Running Qlab 3.1.11 on a 2011 macbook pro, 8 gigs ram, os10.8 and having issues with latency or lag between hitting GO and Qlab reacting. Had similar issues on a different 2013 macbook pro (only 4 gigs ram).

This is a macbook pro that has had the gpu/motherboard replaced twice (and after this will never run a show again), but otherwise is running fine. If it was just this computer or OS I'd blame this machine, but its now two computers, two shows and two OS's. 

Both shows were busyish, 150 cues but probably only 6 stereo tracks at a time and only 6 outs. Both shows had quite a few sharp cues on visuals, which is why its noticeable.

Has anyone else had issues?

Do we need to autoload every cue now?

Are there any known issues I should know about?

thanks

john gzowski

toronto

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi John,

How much lag is it?

If auto-load helps, use auto-load. That means that it’s just taking a while to get media off the disk on your system, and you’ll need to use loads to manage that process.

Are you using a spinning drive? If so, make sure the drive is set to never go to sleep.  

If it’s a 5400 rpm drive, it will be more difficult to get quick responses. We generally recommend a minimum 7200 or SSD drive.

Try these steps: http://figure53.com/notes/2013-10-29-prepare-execute-troubleshoot/

If you see warnings in the console logs, you can send them to us via the contact support menu item to look for clues.

-C

[johng...@mac.com]

Thanks for the quick reply.

The lag varies, which is odd, from 100ms to 1.5 sec I'd guess. I think the drive is a 5400 spinning platter, but its been fast enough to run big multitrack sessions in my DAW. Energy settings are set to never sleep and never let the drive sleep. 

I was logged into the machine with screensharing, as I have on pretty much every Qlab rig I've run since version 1. Logged out and it seemed to settle down, but on the previous show it was an occasional issue with no network on as well. That show we did pre-load every cue, turned off spotlight, turned off everything else we could and rebooted before each show. Still happened occasionally.

Its very odd, I've run a few other shows off of version 3 without these issues, but at this theatre it seems to be a problem (and no, its not op based. SM on both shows witnessed the lag), and I just saw it go nuts while screen sharing.

I'll try putting the show on another drive, can't really think of what else it could be at this point. I could run it off my main machine with its ssd to see if its really the laptop but first I'll see if it was screensharing/network issues. We did have two machines screensharing on the same network, but I've never seen screen sharing issues slow down the Qlab rig computer before.

hmmm

john

[johng...@mac.com]

The only other piece of information that may or not have had something to do with it was that we had just tried to run video and sound off the same computer. Just opening both video and sound shows seemed to max the ram and start the system to page out memory to the hard drive. After we closed the video show and tried to run the video and sound off the merged Qlab file it really didn't work. Audio stuttered like I've never seen Qlab do before, video was slow (video on mp4 and I'm sure not optimized along with some live plugins). We ran for about two video cues before we gave that up, but after closing the audio/video merged show and then running just the audio show the computer seemed really sluggish. Previously we had been running it through screen sharing, so don't have a really objective comparison to see if it was running well before. We rebooted after it was still sluggish and it still had some lag/latency  until I logged off screensharing. 

Don't know if that had anything to do with it or not.

thanks,

john 

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi John,

Sounds like some old-fashioned fine-tuning required.  Drive is slow, computer is being asked to do a lot, etc.

Variable lag isn’t particularly odd when it’s things like “wait for the hard drive to finish loading under variable load”.

We could look through the console logs for more clues, but to me it sounds like just needing to manage the load on the computer.

-C

Subject:  Re: [QLab] Qlab 3 and GO button latency/lag?

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