El Capitan updated and now FCPx is very slow!

so here's whats happening. when starting importing media FCPX consumes all available memory: in my case it uses 68 GB of memory thereof 56 GB are compressed and 23.5 swapped. From my basic computer knowledge this means the application used all available RAM and started swapping the memory to the hard disk as it needs more than the RAM available. At this point I receive a system warning that the application has run out of memory leaving me no other choice than quitting it. The SSD drive on which the application and the OS runs has 50 GB left free at this point (73 GB free normally - the 23 GB that the application uses to swap memory at this point).

Agree with Tom…probably should have someone check your system out.

In some earlier versions of OS X, Mail was identified as a potential source of memory leak. But pretty sure that was fixed in subsequent updates.

A couple of things you could try yourself.

Run Apple Diagnostics to see whether it reports any hardware problems (like faulty RAM).

Clear NVRam.

Russ

Diagnostic tool gave the all clear & even after clearing NVRam the import from iPhone is still not working.

As the import was working a few days back with the same setup and isn't anymore immediately after upgrading to 10.11 I'm pretty sure this is not hardware related...

OK, but this is absolutely not normal behavior for either the application or the OS. I have been running tests with a similar computer, one year older, and a iPhone 6+ and haven't seen anything remotely resembling that.

You might try two tests: one, reboot the computer, without any other applications, launch FCP holding Opt-Cmd to reset it, and see if you get the same performance; two, create a new admin user and try it in there.

thank you for the idea. would you know what I'm loosing by resetting FCP?

I have 2 family generation of media split in 8 libraries taking up 9 TB would hate anything bad to happen at this point. I haven't backed up since upgrading to 10.11 as I want to be sure the system is fine before backing up. Usually incremental backups are not well supported by Mac after major OS releases and you can imagine how long the initial time machine backup takes with such a setup.

best regards - Paul

Nothing. It simply resets the application to its default state and opens, or creates, the default Untitled library in Movies. It doesn't affect any of your libraries in any way. It resets the application preferences, except Destinations.

Are you using Time Machine on the Pegasus? I'd confine TM to the system, and use something esle to back up the media drive, perhaps Carbon Copy Cloner, as it handles FCP library bundles properly.

resetting FCP and importing into an empty library without loading the old libraries didn't change anything. FCP is eating up all the memory and the starts swapping it to the disk until the system hangs. in the process I realised I have 1151 videos on the phone. This slows down importing process of course. On the other hand it always worked before upgrading to 10.11. I will weed out the phone, If import is still not working I'll try to open a ticket with Apple although I don't have a support plan anymore.

Thank you for the backup hint, I'll look into CCC. I use the Pegasus just as local attached storage (15TB setup as Raid 5). The Time Machine backup runs on an 8-bay Synology NAS, which is very time consuming and impossible to constrain to a limited size. I will check whether CCC gives me more options and better support of incremental backups of the FCP libraries. Next step is to build a house around FCP so I can setup a real server room and use proper hardware without having to care about noise & heat emissions 😉

I installed 10.11 and FCPX 10.2.2 It seems a bit laggy even though I'm editing off a usb 3 flash drive, but I have not edited in a while and I did not transcode the H264 video clips to 422 so that might be why its laggy, but even switching tools seems a bit slow cutting clips, hitting play etc. 10.11 overall is much snappier than 10.10.5 in general for me.

Overall FCPX seems fine just a bit slow to do things. Hopefully an update will help. I did have to upgrade to 10.2.2 my earlier version would not even launch

once I upgraded to El Capitan.

Are you trying to import all the videos at once, and optimizing on import? Even this should not cause the problem you are experiencing, but still just asking... are you? I suppose not, but I'm curious.

I have iMac (27-inch late 2012 / 3.4Ghz Intel Core i7 with 32GB of Ram and NVIDIA GeForce GTX680MX 2448 MB ) and the FCP with "El Capitan" is super slow, I hope they fix this quick.

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Did you update to FCPX 10.2.2 no issues here with El Cap 10.11.1 for me, the older version of FCPX was laggy till I updated.

I have a 2008 Mac Pro quad core 2.8ghz-, 32G ram-owc mercury electra 6g ssd running in the PCI utilising the full 6g, and a 5770 graphics card .

I recently upgraded to el capitan version 10.11.2 and have found that FCPX is so slow that it's making it hard to do anything, I did a fresh install of FCPX and reinstalled OS X El Capitan but still no joy, The plugins i use require the 10.11 so i'm stuck, Even my mouse tracks weird when fcpx is rendering. Other than this upgrade my tower has been problem free.

I just installed the latest FCP 10.2.3 on the latest El Capitan 10.14.4 new installation, everything seemed to go well. I have logic & many plugins which FCP complains about in the audio unit manager (387 failed audio units) this should not be a problem because audio units manager disables plugins it cannot use. FCP X take 10 minutes to load up on 2.4Ghz quad core 8G RAM, 256G SSD 2013 macbook pro 15" retina. This seems just plain wrong. Also I resent paying the apple premium to have exactly the same amount of issues you get on windows platform that tries to contend with many many more variable in the software testing & hardware support perspective. Poor quality is really starting to show in Apples testing regime here.

I suggest you create a new thread with specific details. Also, if you have all those plug-ins that are incompatible, you should uninstall them.

FCP X should work just fine on your system, but your system drive is probably too small if you keep your videos there.

How full is your ssd drive? Are you keeping your libraries in a fast external or on the internal SSD?

While the SSD is much faster in general, if it is nearly full the performance will degrade substantially. That may be what is happening to you.

I solved the issue by removing all plugins that El Capitan & FCPX does not support. Of course this is a bad solution for folks who want to use plugins on Logic Pro X as well as FCP X. What is apple doing to their OS & software products testing these days. They seem to have completely lost their grip.