[PD-dev] Fwd: [MACTCL] Improving Application GUI Speed

Sun Apr 13 17:54:43 CEST 2008

Hello to all the PD developers!

As the word goes about improving pd's GUI speed, I thought this is the
perfect opportunity for me to share some ideas, that I've already written
about on the puredata.info homepage.

Let me introduce myself first. My name is Jakob Leben, I'm from Slovenia and
I'm actively using pure data. I can say I have quite some experience with
writing pd externals, but I don't have an integral insight into pd's source
code.

Lately I made an external that visualizes pd's graphic arrays but much
faster than pd natively does. (If I load 20 seconds of audio into a pd's
array the drawing of the array causes clicks in audio. Another big problem
is dragging a graphic array around the patch, that works extra slow.

There are two things one could do:
1. change the algorithm for visualisation of array's data.
2. draw the data onto a specially loaded Tk canvas, so that when dragging
the array around only the canvas' window is translated instead of all the
coordinates for the line that represents data.

Detailed explanation:
1. When the width of array's visualisation in pixels is smaller than the
number of samples written into array it's useless to draw a segment of the
line for each sample of data. Instead you can only draw one vertical segment
of line for each column of pixels drawn: this segment's endpoints are
defined by the minimum and the maximum value of the range of data that is
"covered" by this pixel.
The result of this is exactly the same as the way arrays are drawn now,
though it involves much less line segments being drawn.
2. There is one problem that I came across with using a special canvas to
visualise an array: a click on that canvas doesn't select the pd object that
lies "under" this canvas. This canvas will always be "above" the object as
all the objects are only items of one single Tk canvas, while this new
canvas is the general canvas' child displayed as a general canvas' item of
type window. Tk rule is that items of type window are always "above" all
other items on a canvas.
Thus it would be necessary to make a new binding for mouse events to this
new canvas and somehow pass that click to pd's object.

Now, I realized these ideas in the form of a pd extern that visualises an
array, but i think it would be great to integrate those ideas into pd's
arrays itself. I could do that if only I understood better how PD's arrays
are drawn and how the selection of pd's object works... I tried but it seems
to my like too big a project to dig out myself where in the code and how
those things happen so I would appreciate very much if someone guided me
through this.

I'm willing to put all my effort into making those arrays draw faster.

Sincerely,
Jakob Leben

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 9:01 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org>
wrote:

>
> It seems there is a profiler for Tcl.  Has anyone ever tried it on Pd?
>
> Begin forwarded message:
> > From: Revar Desmera <revarbat at gmail.com>
> > Date: April 9, 2008 10:58:55 PM EDT
> > To: TCL-Mac List <tcl-mac at lists.sourceforge.net>
> > Subject: Re: [MACTCL] Improving Application GUI Speed
> > Delivered-To: hans at eds.org
> > X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.919.2)
> > X-Filter-Rule: ALL_LISTS
> >
> > If you download http://www.belfry.com/code/profile.tcl, and add a
> > 'source profile.tcl' to the beginning of your program, when the
> > program finishes, it'll dump a very detailed timing profile of your
> > code to tclprof.txt, which you can use to determine what to optimize.
> > The report format is very close to that of gprof.
> >
> >       - Revar
> >
> >
> >
> > On Apr 8, 2008, at 1:10 AM, Randolf Schultz wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> please help me getting my application up to speed on MacOSX/Aqua.
> >> It runs fine on Linux/X11, Win32, and even MacOSX/X11. Only on
> >> MacOSX/Aqua it crawls.
> >>
> >> Want to have a look first?
> >> Go to
> >>
> >> http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?
> >> group_id=28460&sel_platform=4542
> >>
> >> (or http://www.ayam3d.org/download.html)
> >>
> >> get both variants (MacOSX/X11 and MacOSX/Aqua).
> >>
> >> Already the application startup is 2-3s (Linux/X11) vs. 10-15s
> >> (MacOSX/Aqua); from then on the MacOSX version is unusably
> >> slow, especially when drawing the scrollable GUIs for the object
> >> properties (those are implemented as window in a canvas).
> >> Another problem area are the pane widgets, that may be dragged
> >> quite fine on X11, but on Aqua they do one hop every 1-2s (and
> >> this is _without_ continuous re-packing the GUI, only dragging
> >> the pane handle, which is a simple packed frame IIRC!).
> >>
> >> The Linux/X11 and MacOSX/Aqua variants were test-run on the
> >> very same machine (MacMini-PPC)!
> >>
> >> So how would you proceed to tackle this problem?
> >> Is there an easy way to profile such complex scenarios with Tcl/Tk?
> >>
> >> best regards,
> >> Randolf
> >>
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> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
> Using ReBirth is like trying to play an 808 with a long stick.    -
> David Zicarelli
>
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