QLab sluggish with Companion

[jtwi...@gmail.com]

I am experiencing sluggish response from QLab 5.3.3 as well as occasionally crackly audio and distortion. I had recently updated both QLab and Compainion (to 3.2). This is on a 2013 MacBook Pro Big Sur 11.7.10.

I suspect I should be using a newer computer. Any other suggestions? Would rolling back Companion to an older version help?

Jim W.

[jtwi...@gmail.com]

Forgot to mention QLab seems to run fine with Companion not running.

[Gil Desrosiers]

Sluggish with audio effects while lighting effects running also have latest upgrades and hardware 

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[daniel....@gmail.com]

Hello,

In my experience, the issues you are experiencing will be due to the CPU being asked to perform too many tasks at once, and not being able to keep up. The crackly/distortion will be dropped audio packets, which is a symptom of this issue. You have narrowed down the cause of the issue to Companion running at the same time as QLab. Here are two things that could be going on here:

- Companion 3.2 could have some underlying inefficiency that is overstretching your processor.

- The QLab plugin within Companion could potentially be requesting/setting a high volume of parameters in QLab via OSC. This could be in turn slowing down QLab.

If I was fault finding this issue, I would be interested in trying a couple of things. Firstly, I would have a look at the OSC logs in QLab to see if there is a high volume of traffic once Companion is opened. It is possible that there is some bug within Companion that is requesting unnecessary data from QLab, and this will highlight this. Secondly, I would be interested to see if the problem was resolved by moving Companion to a different computer. This would remove some load from your 2013 MacBook Pro.

On the surface, Companion shouldn't be too processor intensive, but that isn't to say there isn't a bug/inefficiency there that is being highlighted by your older computer.

Dan

[Taylor Glad]

I would maybe try turning off TCP on Companion to see if that helps.

I experienced something similar last September where I sent my logs into support and Charles notices around 2500 messages being sent to the IP address I had for Companion. I’d done it before without issues, but since I had over 4,000 cues it was bogging down a lot more with status requests.

Turning off TCP from Companion brought my CPU % from peaking over 100% (on an M2 Max MacBook Pro) down to peaking at 55%.