NDI output messing with playback/jitters/hangs? + Autopilot weirdness.

[Scratchpole]

I was preparing my NYE show for a venue I'd not worked at before and they have a 5 x 2k screen with the option to use NDI input to the house server. I was testing NDI output into my second machine as I was building the show and after a couple of hours I noticed some GUI hangs/playback glitching which gradually got worse over time until it became unuseable. It never crashed but would take longer and longer each time to get back on track, switching decks at this point seemed to clear things up a bit temporarily.
I guess this was NDI causing the issue but had some weird little other things so I'll mention them here. I was creating a collage of clips for this show using 5/6 layers and Autopilot on every layer. Sometimes clips which had been removed from layers showed up and played when they had been deleted.
The odd clips contiued to happen even after I stopped using NDI to output and switched to HDMI. So guess there's some issues to iron out with the new autopilot features....

Running on an M2 max, Sonoma 14.5, Arena 7.22.2

Happy new year to you all

[Zoltán]

Sounds like there might have been some kind of memory management issue.
Can you share the composition you used here or on mail@resolume.com ?
Maybe we can spot something in it.

[Scratchpole]

Thanks for the reply Zoltan. Will send it over tomorrow.

I'm having a look at it again and running it now to see how it is behaving. About half an hour in to the test and I've seen one short +-2 second hang. (Since starting to write this it's hung a few more times, gradually getting worse each time). *now been running for an hour and a half and not seen any stutters for a while.
EDIT: 2 hours in and I saw some more longer stopages before giving up for the evening.

Just had a check through the clips in the deck which hung and discovered three that are ProRes422, these are only SD resolution files though. I know mixing codecs is not advised but they slipped through my net. The rest of the clips are DXV3, some 4k and a range of sizes below that. When I trigger those ProRes clips manually there is no issue. I guess if that were the issue switching to HDMI would make no difference.

[Scratchpole]

Starting fresh this morning, I've replaced the Pro Res clips on a newly restarted machine. After about half an hour playback hangs began to happen. Email sent with comp attached.

[Scratchpole]

An update on my progress with this issue.
I've been all around the houses trying to pinpoint where the bottleneck is and have had emails back and forth with Zoltán. Still not 100% sure we've found the definitive answer but it's now running stable enough for the time being.

The one thing I've found which works for me is to use Advanced output to NDI with the Alpha channel switched off rather than NDI streaming the composition from the output menu. This seems to save just enough resources (about 25%) in the encoding and transfer stages of the process. I've been studying Activity Monitor but can't see where the system is explicitly struggling. All 12 CPU cores are running under 50%, GPU 50%-70% with occassional spikes to 100% but that does not coincide with the stutters.