High cpu % in Activity Monitor with Sonoma.

<< No, all the work when I do that is contained to the one drive. >>

That is NOT the way it should be set up. The only thing that performs well that way is number crunching that sits and crunches the same numbers for a long time. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that performance is based solely on Compute power -- it most definitely is NOT.

If you have 24 CPU's, and are using only 1,000 percent of one CPU, you have not even consumed HALF of all your compute power.

You said you had 128 GB or RAM so I assumed you have not used up all that RAM. is the RAM activity monitor Memory pressure still green?

Your top speed is likely limited by the speed of the slowest and busiest drive. If you are not extensively using your additional drives, you are making a critical mistake that will impact performance.

You should have a setup where input files come from one drive, output files go to a different drive, and software, and in a pinch, Libraries and Scratch, might be ok on the boot drive.

If you are seeing spikes to 1,000 percent, it sounds like you should still have 1,400 percent to go before you use up all your compute power.

Where are you files coming form and going to? All on the boot drive? or do you have some fast external SSD drives holding sources or destinations?

You don't appear to be anywhere close to compute-bound. Most users of high-end systems like yours are I/O bound.

Does this work-flow use Libraries or Scratch? Where are those located?

Are you reading from one drive and writing to the other? That would give you the least contention for reading and writing.

if not, you should create some new directories so that you can test that way.

<< ProTools seems to be max'ing out. It's using all 24 cores. The Activity CPU says it's around 800-1000% for that app. >>

Great! That's why you bought 24 cores! 800 out of 2400 is busy, but not used up. Multi-tasking means every core available will be recruited to contribute -- none are ever left idle when there is lots of work to do.

More displays that are showing an unchanging picture do not hardly take any resources, just a bit of memory bandwidth, of which you have plenty on the Ultra. The actual refresh it done by an automaton.

When things are moving, it takes some CPU and GPU time to compute, and shaded objects and smoke and moving reflections are not trivial, but mostly GPU time.

<< the CPU will take a hit when I drag things over to it that are displaying things in real time. The CPU goes up about 200% when I do that. >>

it takes compute power to make things move and sounds to happen. that's not overwhelmed yet.

<< it does all work, it just seems a tiny bit sluggish. >>

By far the easiest way to cause poor performance, instability, overheating and crashing is to install ANY third-party speeder-uppers, Cleaners, Optimizers, or Virus scanners, Bit Torrent, or a VPN that you installed yourself. The main reason is that they are relentless in scanning your files, non-stop, looking for virus-like patterns in Everything, or looking for files that have changed. When completed, they do it all again.

¿Are you running any of those?

iStat menus is not necessary, but is not expected to impact performance.

You should quit Mail as well, but that is generally not as likely to consume much resources.

You should definitely QUIT Safari (not just close all its windows) when you are doing sound sessions, if possible. If not possible, close as many of its windows as possible. it CAN impact performance, depending on what you have open.

Mouse cursor position updates are performed at very low priority in the deep background. This is to prevent 47 thousand updates and screen re-draws from disturbing needed computation time when you only moved the mouse one micron.

When you have all your processors fully engaged doing computation, some users complain mouse cursor position updates can get 'jerky' and erratic, and the mouse cursor position will occasionally overshoot the mark, but are still generally correct.

This is because there is far less "free" background time that can be used to update the cursor way more often, providing the typical buttery smooth gliding around the screen we get used to.

it's not really a defect -- it just tells you your Mac is Very busy (but not yet overwhelmed).

Hi,

Yes it's 100% per core.