Premiere is suddenly incredibly slow with no clear reason why

[johnnygreyzone]

I'm currently editing a feature film on Premiere Pro 2022 and it suddenly, over the course of a weekend away from the computer, gotten unusably slow. Footage plays back choppily, thumbnails take forever to load in bins, and trying to use the text to tool or use anything in the Effects Control panel is a nightmare, with me waiting 20-30 seconds after any input to see the changes appear on screen.

The computer is a 2019 Mac Pro (3.3Ghz 12-Core Intel Ceon processor, 32GB Ram, AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32GB Graphics). The project is a 2K timeline, editing a mixture of footage formats (Mostly XAVC and a little H264) that have all been transcoded to 720p ProRes Proxies. All the footage is stored on an external WD MyBook Duo HDD.

I've run down every possible solution I can think of and nothing seems to help. First I tried switching to a different cable connecting the HDD to the computer. Didn't help. Then I tried switching to editing off of the backup HDD (same model as the main drive) and it also suffered from the same issue, leading me to believe it is not an issue with the external drives. Next I tried updating Premiere to the newest version (23.0). Didn't help either. This setup has worked fine for me for over a year of editing, and is has suddenly become unworkable and I can't seem to figure out if the issue lies with Premiere itself or with my hardware. Any help or advice is appreciated.

[RobShultz]

Maybe go to the top of your interface. Premiere Pro/Preferences/Disk Cache and use the tools to clean the disk cache. I hope that this helps.

[johnnygreyzone]

Unfortunately this did not help, and the cache is set to already clean itself once per week.