[PD] help! my patch breaks pd!

[Miller Puckette]

Hmm, since memory is getting allocated, but almost never freed, as a
patch gets loaded, I don't think fragmentation is possible.  Perhaps
w98 has some per-process memory limit (like the old Mac OS?)  I'm afraid
even to guess.  But I'll at least put an appropriate doomsday message
for the next Pd release so it at least prints something out...

cheers
Miller

On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 02:49:40PM +0200, Krzysztof Czaja wrote:
> hi,
> 
> not really shure what you mean by _calling_ an abstraction.  Reusing
> abstraction definition only (a .pd file), which is more like macro
> expansion (let me talk in a procedural way), or reusing program
> resources, as if calling a routine?  The later would mean passing
> a message to the _same_ place in a patch.  But the same inlet or
> receive as created in an abstraction definition is _not_ the same
> place if used in two different instances of this abstraction.
> 
> The -verbose printout suggests all 2197 copies are created (either
> dynamically with 'obj' message, or statically while reading objects
> from a parent patchfile).  In Pd you always get a separate copy of
> each abstraction instance, thus the full object creation is repeated
> 2197 times -- all steps, including loading from a file and allocating
> memory.
> 
> Each copy of an empty abstraction takes a little over 600 bytes, and
> 600*13**3 == 1.3Mb.  Putting a simple object, like inlet or receive,
> into a patch increases the per-instance amount by about 100 bytes
> (connections take much less).  Assuming your abstraction has 8 i/o
> objects and ~10 simple objects doing the real job, this abstraction
> uses ~4 times the empty abstraction memory size.  But still 5Mb is
> nothing nowadays, so the only possible reason I know of is memory
> _fragmentation_.
> 
> Krzysztof
> 
> (ok, since I was only guessing, the above is not very helpful; perhaps
> you could attach this small abstraction -- not the multi-thousand-line
> main patch of course).
> 
> Greg Rippin wrote:
> ...
> > Thanks Miller for the suggestions.  I tried loading the parent patch with an
> > empty abstraction in place of the one that is called 2197 times (as mentioned,
> > this repeatedly called abstraction is very small, but has two inlets, two
> > outlets, and four receive objects) and the parent patch loaded fine.  I
> > noticed while trying to load the original parent patch (with the repeated
> > abstraction in place) with the -verbose flag, that the parent pd window
> > scrolls as if it's loading many of the instances being called (trying and
> > failing to find the .dll, finding the .pd) for about fifteen seconds before pd
> > dies.
> ...