[PD] Timing the message processing?

[Larry Troxler]

Thanks, everyone who gave suggestions for this. I was asking, thinking
there might off hand be already a mechanism built into PD where it times
the message processing phase. I guess not, but it's no biggie at all,
for me at least, since in practice I think a can always know the longest
length of the message processing chain, and snapshot the time at both
ends.

What I didn't see mentioned, though, is that unlike benchmarking DSP
computations, it would be quite important in benchmarking event
(non-signal) processing, to provide some machinery to measure the
_maximum_ processing time, and not just the average, or a periodically
updated snapshot, which _might_ be ok for checking out DSP times. This
is because, unlike DSP algorithms, which most often don't vary by order
of magnitudes, event processsing time varies quite a lot - sometimes
there is not much to be done, but sometimes a list might need to be
sorted, multiple events output, etc..

I think for now, I will try to measure the event processing time in my
application, and take the max over a good long experimental run. If this
time plus the average DSP processing time is less than what would result
in a DAC overrun, I figure I'm ok. Of course, as I typed this I realise
that I don't know know off hand what that overrun time is - I don't
think it's related to the DSP block size, but rather it would depend on
the DAC buffer size determined by the command line parameters - correct?

Regards

Larry Troxler