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System Drain for a Hobbyist?

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Message 1 of 2
afsnj
256 Views, 1 Reply

System Drain for a Hobbyist?

Hello All.

 

I have been just ben introduced to Smoke on Mac and I have downloaded and installed the pre-trial version.

I have not been this excited about any Mac app in a very long time!

 

With that said, I am simply a hobyiest / novive using a single Mac system for all that I do (Early 2008 Mac Pro loaded, including a Quadro 4000).

 

There appears to by may new processes running after installation and even when Smake is not running itself. I have attached a few screen shots of groups of unusual processes (ones I have not noticed before) as seen by Activity Monitor.

 

The question is... is the burden too much for a single, generalist Mac system?

Thanks!

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Robert.Adam
in reply to: afsnj

Hi Alex.

 

The wiretapgateway process in your screenshot is indeed a process installed by Smoke and that runs in the background even when Smoke is not running. This process is responsible for providing Smoke with access to your Mac's disk drives. It's what makes the drives appear in the "MediaHub".

 

The other processes don't belong to Smoke. Some of them seem related to the PostgresSQL database.

 

Here's a list of other processes that Smoke installs and that run even when Smoke is not running:

- "sw_serverd" -> part of the "stone+wire" group of services. This is the local cached media storage server. Smoke needs this to be able to access the folder.

- "sw_dbd" -> part of the "stone+wire" group of services. This is a database server that keeps a record of all the frames in your Smoke libraries and their location in the cached media folder. 

- "sw_probed" -> part of the "stone+wire" group of services. This is a network server that allows Smoke to communicate with other Smoke workstations on the same network.

- "sw_bwmgr" -> part of the "stone+wire" group of services. This is the bandwidth manager that manages traffic to your Media Cache folder to ensure that Smoke always gets enough bandwidth to play back media.

- "DLmpd" -> this is a service that gives Smoke admin privileges when needed for certain operations.

- "flexnetserver" -> this is the license server (not applicable to the trial)

- "backburnerServer" -> this is the server that performs background tasks for Smoke: generating proxies, generating source media cache, encoding media for export.

- "backburnerManager" -> this is the service that manages the backburner Server. This service is needed because you can have multiple machines act as servers under one manager.

- "ifffsWiretapServer" -> this is a server that provides Smoke and some other Smoke services (e.g. Backburner, wiretap gateway) with access to the smoke Cached Media folder. Required for import and export jobs.

 

Normally, these services should consume very little system resources when they're not used. But if you started a proxy generation job or an export job and then quit Smoke, some of these services will continue running in the background and taking up resources to complete the job. They'll even do that after a restart until the job is complete or you cancel it.

Some of these services will also consume resources if another Smoke workstation on the same network is trying to read projects from your Mac.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Regards,

Robert.



Robert Adam
Program Manager

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