Thanks, David. You’re awesome.
Short answer : It appears the issue was with my USB HD Camera! I guess it never occurred to me that that latency could be affected so easily by the CPU drain from an external device.
I just wired my iphone to the laptop and using that as webcam now, with no more spikes. 🙂
Prior to trying that, I also cleared out GB’s of files from my SSD and did general maintenance with Clean My Mac, so that will be better in the long run too, I think.
Can’t wait to try a new FP Session!
-Ben
p.s.fyi I think the “High Performance” Battery setting you mentioned may be just for M1,M2, etc. devices.(?) I’m on a 15″ Retina MBPro. That said, it seems that my battery health does say “Service Recommended”.
