MAX7 painfully slow

toothpaste's icon

Hey everyone,

Sorry if I am missing something obvious or sth that is recently covered here.

I just migrated to Max7 and I am having huge UI issues.

1 - Typing in object names, changing object positions or simply changing a number box's value are very sluggish. It gets worse once the scheduler is running. It also gets worse over time, i.e. if the patch has been running for a while already.
2 - If I just created an object and want to create another one by hitting N, I usually have to wait for couple of seconds otherwise it won't work. It is not that my command is delayed but it is simply not heard so I gotta hit N again once Max starts listening again.

Where do you think the problem is?
I am a very restless live coder so this kind of fails in interaction is really giving me a hard time.
Any help is very appreciated.

Macbook Pro mid 2012 (2.6ghz Q i7, 8gb, 1gb GT 650M)
Yosemite 10.10.1

tooth.

toothpaste's icon

There is also one more problem:

Say, browsing in an opened dialogue to pick a file to load into a buffer is very sluggish too. This happens regardless of the audio being on/off

Rob Ramirez's icon

there's something going on with your install. please send a message to support.

Rodrigo's icon

I'm having a very similar issue (I emailed support). When I hit 'n' to make a new object, it took nearly 30seconds for the object name to show up! (I even made a vid to email support)

dtimns's icon

i notice incredibly sluggish UI in Max 7 (but not the rest of the system) when my (macbook) laptop is low on battery, maybe could have something to do with GPU throttling

toothpaste's icon

I received a mail from support recommending a clean install. I did it (also by cleaning everything in Library/Application Support). So far it is smoother than ever. It doesn't feel like patch cords need %99 of the cpu power to get connected, anymore! haha.

toothpaste's icon

Nope. The problem is unfortunately back.

toothpaste's icon

I gotta add one detail:
If I open Max and start patching from scratch, once I stop the patch CPU usage drops down almost to zero. But If I open a patch and run it for a bit and then stop the patch, CPU usage will always be around %99-100 as though something in the background still keeps occupying one of the CPU cores. The condition is unchanged even when I entirely close the patch...

Dear guys and girls of the community, please help me.

Wetterberg's icon

>I’m having a very similar issue (I emailed support). When I hit ‘n’ to make a new object, it took nearly 30seconds for the object name to show up! (I even made a vid to email support)

I had this problem with max6. Upgraded to 7, it went away. Upgraded to Yosemite, everything is automagically apple-slower, but not critically.

My point is, this could have been introduced in max6, and not be an inherent max7 problem. That'd be too much of a coincidence, I think.

jamesway's icon

Same here, it seems to go away after closing and opening max a couple of times within Ableton. Maybe the object list needs soo much time to populate ram, but only seems to do so after opening and closing max withing Ableton numerous times. Hope that helps.

Duffield's icon

Know this is old, but same here. I notice that it really tends to happen if jit.movie is in the patch...even if NOTHING is happening. (i.e., jit.movie not playing a movie) but merely in the patch. Often I have to force quit and then Max says that it crashed after the patch closes.

Gotta say this is causing me a looot of grief...

James Bradbury's icon

Was this ever solved? I have the same issue on Macbook Pro 2011. It makes it really annoying to work on patches. I don't get the issue on my beefy desktop computer at home.

Jack M's icon

Just to pitch in on this - I had a similar issue over the last week but it hadn't been an issue before. Everything was sluggish but the worst was when writing text in objects which took forever. It seems to have been an issue with my battery which had died earlier in the week. I replaced it last night and everything is now back to normal..

Max 7.3.4
Macbook Pro 13" Late 2011, OS X 10.10.5, 2.4GHz, 16GB RAM

Hope this helps!

bt.soundmaker's icon

I also had a macbook from 2011 which was slow, it was because of the depleted battery, that MBP only runs at like 30% of it's speed if it's missing a battery.
:)