[PD] OS X performance
chris clepper
cgc at humboldtblvd.com
Wed Jul 28 00:39:20 CEST 2004
On Jul 26, 2004, at 10:47 PM, Mirko Petrovich wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm a Linux user an I'm very happy with pd performance in my desktop
> (PIII 800MHz). Yesterday I tried pd 0.37-1 from Miller's site in a
> Powerbook G4 (1GHz). I compared the cpu usage with patch
> 08.convobros.pd and I saw a big difference. In the Linux system it
> uses about 0.1% and in the G4 about 20%. Why this big difference ?
I just looked at the patch and profiled it. My 1Ghz laptop used about
13% CPU as measured by top. The 0.1% number looks pretty bogus to me
as the P3 is hardly a floating point monster and roughly equivalent to
a PPC 7450 clock for clock. I have noted discrepancies between top and
the real-world on x86 chips in the past (tasks that obviously take lots
of time to complete show up as near zero CPU load).
> Should I use a G4 optimized pd
The main code for Pd has little to no work for OSX and the PPC apart
from making it run. Thomas Grill had some Altivec code for the really
basic stuff like the arithmetic objects that I looked at a while ago,
but I don't know the status of that (devel branch?). If someone did
convert Pd to use fftw then the situation will be much improved as long
as the Altivec code is properly built.
> or should I tweak the OSX system ?
Contrary to popular internet claims, there are not really any OSX
system 'tweaks' to improve performance. The best, and really only, way
to make applications run better is to write better code.
For example:
> I tried some Gem patches too, and G4 performed a lot better
> (excepting the nVidia bug).
Maybe that will get fixed at some point.
cgc
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