High cpu % in Activity Monitor with Sonoma.

I'm still trying to understand what the activity cpu% monitor is actually telling me. I have an M2 Studio Ultra, 24 core (16 performance and 8 efficiency cores) and 128 gig of RAM. I have 6 4k displays hooked up. I use all of them with ProTools and I have giant session up with not many backround apps running and my Protools CPU level was topping off at 1000% just at some spikes. Things are actually running but slower for sure with ProTools errors from time to time. My question is, what does that 1000% cpu with ProTools mean? Is it 100% per core? I know ProTools is now using all the cores as well. Just wondering if I can judge my machine's sluggishness on this number.

Mac Studio

Posted on Jul 1, 2024 8:13 PM

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

145,385 points

Posted on Jul 2, 2024 9:10 AM

<< No, all the work when I do that is contained to the one drive. >>

That is NOT the way it should be set up. The only thing that performs well that way is number crunching that sits and crunches the same numbers for a long time. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that performance is based solely on Compute power -- it most definitely is NOT.

If you have 24 CPU's, and are using only 1,000 percent of one CPU, you have not even consumed HALF of all your compute power.

You said you had 128 GB or RAM so I assumed you have not used up all that RAM. is the RAM activity monitor Memory pressure still green?

Your top speed is likely limited by the speed of the slowest and busiest drive. If you are not extensively using your additional drives, you are making a critical mistake that will impact performance.

You should have a setup where input files come from one drive, output files go to a different drive, and software, and in a pinch, Libraries and Scratch, might be ok on the boot drive.

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High cpu % in Activity Monitor with Sonoma.

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