[PD] Pd 20% idle CPU usage on MBP

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Tue Nov 16 18:15:05 CET 2010


On Mon, 15 Nov 2010, Jamie Bullock wrote:

> Does that mean that Mathieu was wrong earlier about the PABLIO interface 
> not causing any significant overhead?

Blocking IO doesn't cause overhead, it just causes blocking. It's a kind 
of lock, just like how sending a message in Pd blocks the sender until the 
receiving methods say that the processing is over ("return").

AFAIK, the worse it does, is limit the maximum amount of CPU that Pd's DSP 
can use, because with blocking, it's like Pd's DSP is running on the same 
CPU as the process that the sound is sent to, EVEN when they don't even 
run on the same CPU.

But that CPU has to be spent somewhere. Switching to a non-blocking 
interface doesn't reduce the amount of heat generated by your CPU. (it 
might even increase it just a tiny bit, as it's more work to handle more 
tasks that want to run at the same time... but that's much less than 1%).

  _______________________________________________________________________
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC


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