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| Avid Knowledge Base |
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Optimising Processor Affinity for Pro Tools on Windows
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Last Updated : November 13, 2020
Products Affected : Pro Tools, Pro Tools HD, Pro Tools First, Pro Tools Ultimate
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The performance of Pro Tools (particularly at the lowest buffer sizes) may be improved on multi-core or multi-processor Windows systems by adjusting the Processor Affinity - the configuration of CPU cores that a process or application is permitted to use. In particular, prohibiting Pro Tools from utilising CPU 0 has been seen to resolve issues with overall CPU usage or CPU spikes that can result in underrun errors such as AAE -9173, -9093 or -6101. This article describes how to adjust processor affinity for Pro Tools to not use CPU 0 on both a temporary (per launch) basis and also on a more permanent basis that persists through application launches and computer reboots.
Processor affinity can be set manually on a per launch basis from the Windows Task Manager:
1. Launch Pro Tools and open a typical session that may have exhibited performance errors.
2. Press CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to open Windows Task Manager (or right-click in the Windows Taskbar and choose Task Manager).
3. Click on the Details tab, and scroll down the list to find ProTools.exe (if there is no Details tab, click More details at the bottom of the window).
4. Right-click it, and choose Set affinity:
5. In the Processor affinity window start by unchecking CPU 0 and press OK:
6. Go back to Pro Tools, and check performance (it may be helpful to open Window>System Usage in Pro Tools and note the CPU load before and after changing affinity settings).
Note that setting affinity in this manner will only persist until Pro Tools is quit - it will have defaulted back to using all cores on the next launch. In order to set it with the desired settings on every launch the shortcut used to launch Pro Tools needs to modified:
1. Right-click the shortcut you use to launch the application (for example the Pro Tools desktop shortcut) and choose Properties. Note that Pro Tools must subsequently always be launched from the modified shortcut in order for the settings to be applied.
2. In the "Shortcut" tab, replace the text in the "Target" field with the following:
cmd /c start "Pro Tools" /affinity fffffffffffffffe "C:\Program Files\Avid\Pro Tools\ProTools.exe"
3. Press Apply (you may be asked to enter an Administrator password) and then press OK.
4. Launch Pro Tools by double-clicking this shortcut, and verify that the affinity settings are then set as expected in Windows Task Manager, and that performance has improved.
Depending on the configuration, it may be that further performance improvements can be made by prohibiting Pro Tools from accessing more cores than just CPU 0 so it's worthwhile experimenting with the affinity settings via Task Manager. Once the optimum settings are found, they can be set as defaults by editing the hexadecimal value specified after the /affinity switch in the Target field (fffffffffffffffe is the value to disable only CPU 0 on any system with up to 64 cores). To calculate the required value, each core from highest to lowest is assigned a binary digit according to whether it is enabled or disabled (1 for enabled, 0 for disabled) and then the entire string expressed in hex. For example, a system with 8 cores where you only want Pro Tools to be permitted to use CPU cores 1, 3, 5 and 7 would require the value aa:
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