Constant CPU utilization at times

[jwiegley]

I'm at the 3rd day of my trial of Photo Supreme, and I noticed something a bit odd on several occasions: When I'm scrolling through the list of thumbnails things are responsive and quick — a feat which, strangely, few cataloging application seem to be able to manage these days — but then something happens that makes the app suddenly become sluggish and gummy.

Running Activity Monitor, I can see during these times that Photo Supreme is constantly using ~100% of a CPU core. I thought maybe it was doing some kind of background indexing or something, so I left it to run overnight, and when I came back, it was still using a full core, continuously, a full day later. No matter how much time I gave it, it never stopped using CPU.

I ran Instruments and see if the CPU profiler could shed any light. According to where the CPU is spending it's time, something is doing a LOT of image rendering, even though nothing is happening in the app. Activity Monitor also shows a relatively constant number of kernel system calls and context switches happening, every second. I've attached the relevant part of the Instruments stack trace.

Where it gets a little stranger is that, even though if left alone it does not stop using CPU, if I play around with the UI — changing to the light table, then the single image preview, back to the preview with the thumbnails, then it DOES stop using CPU and the UI becomes faster and more responsive again.

I don't know what it's doing in the background during these busy times, and there's no activity log I can find to show me what it might be doing...

This is the system I'm running on, using the latest version of Photo Supreme as of today:

iMac Pro 2017
Processor: 3 GHz 10-Core Intel Xeon
Graphics: Radeon Pro Vega 56 8GB
Memory: 64 GB 2666 MHz DDR4
macOS Sonoma 14.5

[Hert]

A warm welcome to the forum.
Thank you for the elaborate message.
This is a user-to-user forum.
For such technical queries it is best to contact me via support. Find the details in my signature here.

Thank you
Hert

[jwiegley]

Thank you Hert, I will shift such communications there.

[Billio]

Hello

I am a new user and am experiencing the same issue (high CPU usage seems to occur when synchronising - 386% + see image below. Would be good to know why/how to prevent it in the future.
Many thanks.
Billio

[Hert]

A warm welcome to the forum.

On macOS, seeing a processor (CPU) usage of 386% can be confusing because it seems to exceed the typical 100%. However, this is due to how macOS reports CPU usage on systems with multiple cores.

A processor use of 386% (on macOS) means that almost 4 of the processor cores are at work. That's a good thing. FYI, an Apple M-processor has 8 processor cores...in that case macOS can report up to 800%.

Photo Supreme is doing a lot of its tasks in background processes. Your computer has multiple cores (you don't mention what processor you're using) so that multiple processes can work concurrently. That average modern CPU processor has a multitude of cores.

The biggest bottleneck is always the disk. PSU is a database system and benefits from high disk throughput. Hence, store your catalog on the fastest disk available. Typically that is an internal SSD.

[Billio]

Hello Hert

Thanks for your welcome note and help.
My imac has a 3.8GHz 8-core Intel Core i7 processor.
Re storage of catalogue. I presume you mean EXTERNAL SSD?

One other question. Every time I open PS, it continues to synchronise. It has 127,000 images to synchronise in batches of 2,500. I've calculated that each batch takes 30 seconds to sync, so 127k should take 25.4 minutes. However, for days now it is continuing to synchronise.
Any settings or suggestions to stop this?
Many thanks.
Bill

[RobiWan]

Hello Bill,

One other question. Every time I open PS, it continues to synchronise.
...
Any settings or suggestions to stop this?

I am not sure if I have understood it correctly. If PSU says ~17000 metadata must be read, then you will have no choice but to give the program the time to do so. Aborting makes little sense because it has to do it.

[G8DHE]

Has the system compacted the database at all, normally once a large number of changes have been made it will prompt you at startup to do a compacting, not sure if it already has a queue of sync's to complete ? Possibly worth doing one from the menu whatever to see if it improves the situation?

[Billio]

Hello Geoff

Thanks of your reply.
PS has compacted a couple of times whilst syncing.
I'll try compacting again.
The synching marches on.
Regards.
Bill

[Hert]

Is the number going down with every restart?
If not, verify your top level folder.

[Billio]

Hello Hert

I have verified the top level folder however it's still synchronising 126758 files in batches of 2500.
I wonder if there is a setting I can change to solve this or just let it run? It doesn't annoy, I'm just curious as to why?
Many thanks.
Billio

[noramila]

I’ve had similar issues. Storing the catalog on an SSD helped a lot with speed. Also, try compacting the database from the menu. That improved things for me.

[Hert]

noramila is spot on here.
The performance of the sync process can be heavily impacted when the catalog files are stored on a slow disk. Keep the catalog files on the fastest disk you have available, typically that is an internal SSD drive

[noramila]

Thanks for the confirmation. I’ll make sure to store the catalog on the SSD for better performance.