Logic Pro Studio 9 - Disk too slow message, using network storage.

[tom_pearson]

We have a suite of iMacs that I've just configured to use OD/AD bind with no problems. Students home folders and a 'Music Drive' are located on our main storage SAN (NetApp).

 

Whenever a student loads a large project (e.g. one of the demo songs that are included with Logic) from this network location and begins to play the song, as soon as Logic comes across a location in the song that contains a large amount of data the "Disk is too slow or system overload" message is displayed.

When monitoring the NetApp system, nothing abnormal is going on during the errors. We also monitored the network during these processes and again, nothing abnormal (Low utilisation).

 

So, I moved the demo songs to a smaller/slower NAS system (4 x WD Caviar Green disks) and when playing the project the error is seen a lot less, or more likely seen when 3 other iMacs are running the same project at once.

 

These demo projects work fine when run from local disk.

 

 

Firstly I'd like to know whether running Logic projects from a network location has been done before, and if so how can we ensure this error isn't displayed?

Could someone explain how Logic handles the data that is streamed?

 

The bottom line is, I really don't want to go back to running them from local disk!

 

 

Many thanks in advance

[saundersmatt]

Hi Tom,

 

We run Logic Pro Studio 8 in the AD/OD setup with home directories shared on a san via SMB on windows server 2008.

We do occasionally hit the same error message, but predominantly we have summised that this is more to do with network traffic back to the server room than disk access speed. We do fairly regularly get a message which says "logic could not save this file" which we have devised is somehow related to saving to SMB rather than AFP. Do you experience this issue too?

 

Matt

[tom_pearson]

Hi Matt,

 

Thanks for the reply, it's good to know someone else is doing a similar thing and interesting to know you aren't receiving the same messages.

Do you know what sort of projects are being run from this storage? i.e. how many audio tracks etc?

 

We haven't really used the system enough to experience the saving to SMB error message, but I will keep that in mind when we do!

[CyberNerd]

how about trying an NFS share? it should be faster than samba

[morganw]

I've had this message on Logic 7 and 8 on a non-networked Mac with local storage. This really isn't designed to run over a network.

[Marci]

You can reduce data sizes by working in lower quality... ie: 32khz / 16bit, but audio quality will suffer. Ultimately DAW software was never intended to run off anything other than local disk... a fast local drive is semi-essential. Running over network I'd expect to see issues above 8ch at cd quality. The latency of incoming data + CPU cycles applying fx in realtime to that data means it can't maintain steady playback whilst keeping processing across all tracks simultaneously in sync. if the ASIO buffer / core buffer can't be kept full it's game over.

 

That said, a local 2.5" 7200rpm can handle 32ch multitrack recording of a 3hr concert at 48khz. Your issue won't be network load but more likely r/w speed of the raid array in your fileserver.

[morganw]

The load balancing of audiounits used to be awful as well, no intelligence whatsoever so you had to load balance cores by creating busses per core for insert effects. It did seem to have some kind of adaptive load balancing / caching in there somewhere though, normally when I loaded a project and tried to play it back the first time it would overload, then maybe get a little further on the next couple of tries. On the fourth of fifth go it would normally playback with no problems.

[tom_pearson]

Hi Tom,

 

We run Logic Pro Studio 8 in the AD/OD setup with home directories shared on a san via SMB on windows server 2008.

We do occasionally hit the same error message, but predominantly we have summised that this is more to do with network traffic back to the server room than disk access speed. We do fairly regularly get a message which says "logic could not save this file" which we have devised is somehow related to saving to SMB rather than AFP. Do you experience this issue too?

 

Matt

 

Another question for you Matt, what are the hardware specs of your SAN?

 

 

Thanks for all of your replies chaps, I understand that Logic isn't really designed to work over the network, but given the speeds of storage/connections these days it just seems like a viable option. I will naturally keep you all up to date with any progress we make.