10.6.7 Runaway FCP Processes

[JohnKSF]

Apple Feedback Assistant ID: MISSING

Describe the bug
There appears to be some catalyst which causes FCP to unnecessarily go into a process loop causing multiple CPU's to reach peak capacity and degrade complete system performance.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:
This behavior appears to be completely random and may occur when using a hotkey CMD+Tab to go between running applications.

4. Here is a snip of the console report indicating an issue with "Wakeups"

Date/Time: 2023-07-27 18:33:44.210 -0700
End time: 2023-07-27 18:34:35.468 -0700
OS Version: macOS 13.5 (Build 22G74)
Architecture: arm64e
Report Version: 40
Incident Identifier: 6F8489DE-48B2-42CA-A9AE-7D018291DEFA

Data Source: Microstackshots
Shared Cache: 9C875B0A-D532-3933-B1F0-F1EA72CEDDE2 slid base address 0x1904c0000, slide 0x104c0000
Shared Cache: 0F220D33-5DD0-30C3-9960-5E85B0D54462 slid base address 0x1bb80c000, slide 0x3b80c000

Command: Final Cut Pro
Path: /Applications/Final Cut Pro.app/Contents/MacOS/Final Cut Pro
Identifier: com.apple.FinalCut
Version: 10.6.7 (408080)
Build Version: 4
Product Build Version: 20A104
Project Name: ProEditor
Source Version: 40800080016000000
Team ID: PTN9T2S29T
App Item ID: 424389933
App External ID: 858081843
Is First Party: Yes
Resource Coalition ID: 4047
Architecture: arm64
Parent: launchd [1]
PID: 8136

Event: wakeups
Action taken: none
Wakeups: 45001 wakeups over the last 51 seconds (878 wakeups per second average), exceeding limit of 150 wakeups per second over 300 seconds
Wakeups limit: 45000
Limit duration: 300s
Wakeups caused: 45001
Wakeups duration: 51s
Duration: 51.26s
Duration Sampled: 50.19s
Steps: 61

Hardware model: Mac13,1
Active cpus: 10
HW page size: 16384
VM page size: 16384

Fan speed: 1327 rpm
Advisory levels: Battery -> 2, User -> 2, ThermalPressure -> 0, Combined -> 2
Free disk space: 1417.51 GB/1858.19 GB, low space threshold 3072 MB
Vnodes Available: 75.28% (198106/263168)

Expected behavior
Consistent process behavior.

Screenshots
If applicable, add screenshots to help explain your problem.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: MacOS 13.5
• Browser: Brave
• Version 1.56.14

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: OnePlus 9 Pro
• OS: Oxygen 13
• Browser: Brave
• Version 1.52

Additional context
I did have an instance of Chrome running at the start of the issue. I shut it down but the issue persisted for another 1-2 minutes.

[latenitefilms]

I've also experienced this - even when FCPX is in the background, seemingly doing nothing, it's using up a heap of CPU and GPU cycles.

[JohnKSF]

Another incident this morning. Again hotkeying between browser and FCP generated a huge amount of FCP cycles. This persisted even after closing the project and library.

Closing FCP entirely ended the issue.

[latenitefilms]

@JohnKSF - Are you still seeing the same issue on Final Cut Pro 10.7?

[joema4]

If this problem is still happening, we need to see a spindump of FCP taken while in the high CPU state. Procedure: select FCP process in Activity Monitor and press CTRL+OPT+CMD+S keys. Save that as a .txt file and post it here.

If that is not sufficient, the command-line xctrace command can be used to capture an Instruments trace, but that requires the user to have XCode installed.

If installing XCode is too difficult, it's possible to use the built-in command-line tool 'sample' to capture a sampled execution profile and then build a flame graph from that which shows the execution profile. Doing that requires using an Awk script to preprocess the sampled data, then using a Perl script to convert that to an SVG flame graph file, viewable in Safari or other browsers. Those are both part of the flame graph package available in Homebrew: https://brew.sh

See the attached sample of an FCP flame graph showing progressive zoom-in for finer detail.

1. stackcollapse-sample.awk pre-processes 'sample' output
2. flamegraph.pl generates the flame graph.

Example syntax:

awk -f /opt/homebrew/bin/stackcollapse-sample.awk /Users/josephmarler/Documents/FCPSample3s.txt > ~/Documents/FCPSampStackCollap.txt

perl /opt/homebrew/bin/flamegraph.pl ~/Documents/FCPSampStackCollap.txt > ~/Documents/FCPFlameGraph.svg