Fw: [PD] Pd and Gem, some questions regarding performance

[Olaf Matthes]

Hi Rory, Ricardo,

I would not recommend to use netsend / netreceive! As I pointed out in my post
concerning the 'blocking netsend', the problem is that any action that can not be
executed within one dsp cycle is likely to crash Pd or at least cause interrupted
audio.

I think using midi to send data from one machine to another should be saver. In my
'music for films' patch I used netreceive to get the input from the webinterface.
It sometimes happened that Pd was freezing when a new socket was opened or just
data transmitted. But I have to say that I also used oggcast~ and shoutcast~
externals on the same machine (which create their own sockets and cause a lot of
net traffic) and was getting a total CPU load of around 80 - 95 % on a P4 1.8GHz
running Win2k.
As I understand it, midi is only processed / received from the input fifo when
there is any time left to do so (please correct me someone in case it's completely
wrong). I usually use a midi fader box to controll my Pd patches because this is
much saver than using the mouse. The GUI sometimes becomes really slow making it
nearly impossible to move any sliders or number boxes (or even to turn off dsp).

In general I sometimes feel that a faster machine not necessarily improves
performance or stability. I have some externals that use, say, 25 % CPU on a P2 400
MHz and 20% on a P4 1.8 GHz. That's not really what one would expect (I would
expect CPU usage to go down to about 8%).


Olaf


Ricardo Climent schrieb:

> Also I  would manipulate midi instructions remotely
> (using netsend/receive) and do the dsp-process in the target computer, unless
> you want to stream the audio from other computer via Ethernet using other
> objects.