After Effects 22 spacebar playback slow and stuttering compared to 18.4.1

[nicola_s]

Hello everyone, I'm working on a very simple comp in AE 22 on Monterey (iMac 5K 2017, 4,2Ghz core i7, 32GB, Radeon pro 580 8gb; operating system, project and cache on three separate SSD drives).

The comp is basically a logo (a precomped vector graphic), moving in from outside the frame to the center, with a couple of audio tracks (one mp3 and one wav).

On AE 22 pressing the space bar produce a very slow caching of frames (green segments appearing), and after a couple of seconds of the comp are cached and I try to play back, the playback itself can't keep up, it hangs or drop frames. It doesn't matter if it's adaptive resolution or final quality, if it's (auto) or 1/4, AE 22 cannot preview that comp. 

I remember having enjoyed decent previewing in the previous version, so I've downloaded the previous AE - 18.4.1 - and opened the same project: instant caching and flawless playback at full resolution.
I guess there are still some kinks to be worked out in the latest one, but at the moment 22 is pretty much unusable. Anyone else having similar issues?

[nicola_s]

For what it's worth and if it helps anyone: I checked my caches external drive and found out I still had cached folders for previous versions, and the disk was almost full (had 25Gb free or so). After emptying all cache folders the spacebar playback started working as intended also in version 22. 

So, it seems like if there is no space left on the caches drive, AE just silently stops caching. Which is alright, but there was no warning about it.

[nishu_kush]

Thanks for updating the thread, nicola_s.

Feel free to reach out if there are any other questions.

Thanks,

Nishu