Hello,

Long story short...  Running 7 systems on a Unity Media Engine.  Systems are mostly MacPros with 8GB ran, v.10.5.5 of OS and version 3.1.1 of Media Composer.  Unity is 5.1.1.  All but two are attached fibre...  Two are Ethernet.

The project is very large...  It contains bins from two years of work...  Thousands of them total.  We also have 16 workspaces with tens of thousands of files (though no one folder contains more than 5,000.)

This past week, I've noticed some sluggishness at times when saving and four or five Bus Errors between the seven systems...  In other words, nothing too catastrophic, but things have been so stable for the past two months it's worth noticing... 

I've repaired Disk Permissions on the Macs and tossed MC State and Site Settings.  No errors on the Unity logs...  I recently optimized all work spaces.   

Was thinking about tossing the .loc and .log files from the project, if this will help?...

I'm reluctant to upgrade mid-project since we have a mix of PC and Macs (plus a PC Symphony Nitris.)  Unless Avid can recommend a version that has a proven smooth transition and is highly stable across platforms...

Any advice is welcome!

I fins trashing the .avs file from the project helps alot.

Randall had mentioned something about renaming the subfolders in the Avid MediaFiles folder every so often to limit the number of files in any one subfolder. I believe the self-imposed by MC/Symphony is 5,000 files, but better performance can be had by limiting to around 1,000 or even less.

I'm recalling this info. from memory, so I hope someone can chime in and clarify/correct it. Nothing I work on is that complicated, so I don't do this myself.

We started doing this on feature films with OMF media, when the file count was limited to 1,200 in OS9.  After each Telecine session (using Avid MediaStation Telecine ) we'd rename the OMFI MediaFiles folder to match the dailies reel name.  We're still doing this today.

When MXF became the new standard, I instructed our Night Assists to rename the "1" folder to the current date.  then, as they started to capture, Avid would create a new "1" folder, and the total file count would be minimized.

It appears that Avid can handle many databases, just not large ones.

Additionally, I'm not a big fan of using a single large project, even for episodics.  You might want to create some additional projects, and break out the Bins in some logical groups.  Only open Bins you're working on, and only have 1 sequence per (working) Bin.

... and backup your project "every" night to a separate physical disk.

Curious to hear if any of these suggestions have helped you.  I generally follow these same suggestions as well -- 1200 items per folder and I try to move old/un-needed bins out of the project itself and into an archive folder.   I leave the archive folder on the Unity so it can be accessed easily by going to Open Bin.   Keeping the project as small as possible also helps with speeding up my nightly backups.