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[bluedy1]

I use a macbook pro 2011 with 16gb of memory and SSD. My music is located on a Drobo (20TB) where I have more than 260.000 tracks. After 30 minutes of playing music the fan becomes noisy and unstoppable and quite clearly the computer cannot cope with MC. I previously had only 8gb of memory. I thought 16gb would make a difference, it does not. I had read that MC could cope with large libraries, apparently it cannot.
Any advice? thanks

[Awesome Donkey]

My guess is auto import, and/or thumbnail building, and/or analyze audio is running in the background which is causing resource usage to spike (hence the noisy fan). Adding additional memory wouldn't do anything to help fix this.

Try reading this topic and follow Brian's steps in this post: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=105699.msg735473#msg735473

[dfortney]

When I added my music and created my library in MC it went through a number of processing steps such as analyzing the audio, pulling the album art, etc. and this process does indeed take a long time and kick the fan on overdrive.  I only have around 30k tracks and it took overnight to run so you should maybe expect it to take a few days with a decent internet connection.  If it gets interrupted during the process it seems to not be able to recover (for example if the computer decides to go to sleep) so be sure to use a program like Caffeine and be sure it keeps your computer awake the entire time.  Maybe set it up and then take a short vacation

[blgentry]

After 30 minutes of playing music the fan becomes noisy and unstoppable and quite clearly the computer cannot cope with MC.

What the others said is definitely worth checking out.  Your problem could easily be related to background processing of a large collection.

You should also know that the 2011 MBPs are known for having a heat issue with the CPU.  There was a class action lawsuit and Apple extended a recall program:

https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/

The symptoms that they cover have to do with video failures.  My MBP had a severe video issue and I sent it in for repair.  Weird stuff happened and they ended up replacing the main board in the computer.  When I got it back I noticed something miraculous:  The fans were no longer running all the time with small loads.  Before the repair, the fans would kick on with a 15 to 20% load on the CPU and go pretty crazy at seemingly full speed until I stopped processes consuming CPU.  After the repair, the computer's fans didn't run nearly as often.  They still kick on, but much less frequently and they don't spin to top speed as often or as fast.

Is your computer affected by the story I just told?  Maybe, maybe not.  It's just some information for you to consider.

Brian.

[MrBiff]

MC on Mac is very slow to import.  It seems to create many addition heavy process to handle import.

Here is video to show import of 62 very small mp4 files.  All analysis and look ups are disable.  Still it takes a painful 1 minute.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g5wwxxt2hgl5z6d/slow_import.mp4?dl=0

[bluedy1]

Thanks to all for the replies. Unfortunately none is really relevant to my issue. My library has been large for years and even though I am adding to it on a daily basis it has been only for some months that it shows problems (above 200 k tracks maybe). Media Center in this regard was much better than iTunes or Audirvana but apparently now I have reached the ceiling.
Funny when I clicked to get system informations it never opens: it is working and working but it never comes. But fan stopped so it is one less noise. Obviously there are many informations to pick up with my large library. I am afraid Drobo will explode at some stage with the hard drives running full speed for this information check.
Regarding The mbp is 2011 but on Apple website they say that only 15 and 17" are concerned, mine is a 13".
If there are other clues please share. have good day all!

[blgentry]

Thanks to all for the replies. Unfortunately none is really relevant to my issue. My library has been large for years and even though I am adding to it on a daily basis it has been only for some months that it shows problems (above 200 k tracks maybe). Media Center in this regard was much better than iTunes or Audirvana but apparently now I have reached the ceiling.

No, you're wrong.  MC has been tested with libraries with over 1,000,000 tracks.  It gets a little slower at that level.  Even at 200k it should be a little slower than say 10k.  But it should not influence CPU usage.

Try running activity monitor and sort by CPU usage and see what is using CPU.  If it's MC, see how *much* CPU it's using.

Funny when I clicked to get system informations it never opens: it is working and working but it never comes.

Something is broken.  The system information window should show up just about instantly.  Since it isn't showing up, something is wrong.  I'm assuming you've tried restarting MC and rebooting the mac?

But fan stopped so it is one less noise. Obviously there are many informations to pick up with my large library. I am afraid Drobo will explode at some stage with the hard drives running full speed for this information check.

No.  System Info doesn't scan all of the tracks in your library.  It should not cause any disk activity at all.  System Info is just a screen that shows you statistics about your library and system, plus information on what background processes are running.  It won't cause disk access.

Regarding The mbp is 2011 but on Apple website they say that only 15 and 17" are concerned, mine is a 13".

Ok, so yours probably has an i5 instead of an i7.  It should still be fast enough to run MC with a medium-large library.  You might try running the MC benchmark just to see what score it gets for reference:  Help > Benchmark > Run benchmark .  I'm guessing yours will score in the 1800 - 2000 range.  But your MC doesn't seem to be acting correctly, so maybe not. You might need to reinstall MC.  It's non-destructive and pretty quick, so it's not a bad idea to try.

There's also the possibility that you have a hardware issue of some sort:  Failing drive, failing CPU, or maybe bad RAM.  It wouldn't be all that unusual on a 5+ year old machine.  I hope your machine is just fine, but it's possible it has an issue.

Good luck and let us know what you find.

Brian.