Suddenly FCP slows MBPro down to a crawl
 

Is anyone seeing this? How did you fix it?

Have been using FCP happily for 6 months on my 17" 2.8Gz 4gb ram MacbookPro. Didnt use it for a month but installed Logic 8 in the meantime. Suddenly today I launch FCP (latest version) and it is working at a terribly slow crawl (literally 5-10 sec to respond to a mouse click on the menu, and 10-20s to redraw a screen, playback is non-existant) - when I quit FCP the MBP is working at a crawl and I have to re-boot to get back to normal speed. This happens with Compressor as well but WITH NO OTHER PROGRAM,ie, DVDSPro, Logic, iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, Safari all work fine.

Thanks for any help, I'm in despair......

It's been a long time since I've heard of an application-gone-haywire situation but...

What you need to do *first* and foremost is make sure your system isn't overloaded with temp and cache files: Download Onyx for Mac and run ALL it's cleaning and maintenance routines. Do this before any further troubleshooting.

Next, you didn't indicate whether or not you're on a single-drive system or if you have any external HDD's connected for your edit sessions. If you are only working from the single internal HDD then it's also possible that it has become over-full.

Do a Right-Click (or option click) on your HDD and go a "Get Info" command and see how much free space you have left. If you have less than 20% of free space left that could also be the main culprit as FCP requires a lot of free space to be allocated to make room for all the temp files it creates along with renders.

Check out those two things first and let us know the results.

Cant leave it alone even over Xmas....!
 

Thanks Robert

the MBP HD has 350Gb free and the external drive that is the FCP scratch disk has 500Gb free.

I turned on Activity monitor - weird - it shows the CPU is maxxed out at 100%. 2 processes are maxxing it out - "ReportCrash" and "rooksd". Both are root processes. No wonder everything is at a crawl as the CPU is being thrashed at 100% with no let-up.

I did a search on these and there is nothing on apple or web on these 2 processes that I could find. If I try a force quit the MBP hangs.

When I reboot everything works fine. only 2 apps cause this problem to happen FCP and Compressor. When I check software update it tells me I am up to date on versions.

I've made an appt at our local genius bar but this sounds unique and weird - I thought it might be a virus but surely that wouldnt launch with fcp/compressor only?

Is there a printscreen function I can do to paste the activity monitor?

Thanks

There are a few built-in commands for capturing the screen. The best one allows you to stretch a capture area over only the section you want to capture:

COMMAND-SHIFT-4.

I'd still download and run Onyx and see if that clears it up.

Also, if you're running Snow Leopard you can reinstall the OS and it will clear out all bad code without changing or deleting all your apps. See my page about Self-Healing Mac OSX:

Mac OS X Update: Self-healing Snow Leopard ! | Go-Go-Godzilla.com

Its not the Mac, its me!
 

I turned up at the Genius Bar and they fixed it - I had a anti-phishing plug-in running called RAPPORT which was spawning some endless loop and maxxing out the CPU. The Genius guy turned it off and everything is fine. Whooh, glad it was just stupid user-error, what was i thinking using my FCP machine for internet use? lesson learnt....

So Dont Install Rapport.

cheers