I know I'm on shaky ground as far as Pro Tools is concerned with Mojave, and Antelope doesn't officially support it yet either, so I'm wondering if the clicking is related to that rather than general performance issues. Overall it is performing much better without Ozone which I still haven't added back (all I'm doing there is IRC 1 limiter), but there is still an incessant clicking happening the whole time. Adding Melodyne back, it took a little bit of a hit. Session was still fairly responsive after adding back Slate and Waves plugs, no CPU overload errors to speak of. I trashed prefs, turned off Spotlight indexing, moved session to internal SSD, and moved all 3rd party plugins to unused plugins folder and started to replace. My hope was to just restore my new machine from a backup of my old machine and get back to work without making a big project out of this- how naive! I had been keeping an eye on Activity Monitor, no other significant processes running in background. Thanks for the helpful tips guys, sorry I didn't do a little more due diligence up front. Based on your guys' experience, what would you expect with a session this size and a computer of those specs? I was getting fairly solid performance out of my work's 2015 MBP (which was maybe a quad core i5?) until adding my last few mastering plugins on the 2 buss, so I expected the new machine to be head and shoulders above that in performance, but have not been blown out of the water like I was expecting to be. I am for sure running a decent handful of plugins, but there are not 'that' many tracks. I attached a screenshot of the session I'm running.

I tried opening up a session just to see what would happen, and though everything basically works, I was expecting pretty stellar performance from such a powerful processor, but I'm still getting some clicks/pops/AAE -6101 CPU overload errors. I got the most powerful Mac I could afford, only to find that you can't run older versions of OS X than what the computer came with- whoops- so now I have about 13 days to decide to either return the computer (a fairly significant investment as you can imagine), or wade into the muddy waters of making stuff work in Mojave that has yet to be officially supported. When the track freezing feature was introduced that helped some, but it was just taking FOREVER to mix cause the computer just couldn't keep up, even on smaller sessions. Hey all- just got a new 2019 iMac with 8-core i9, was tired of fighting my old machine whose CPU just could not keep up (2010 MBP.

Average heat temp for 2012 mac mini