PD and profiling (was: Re: [PD] Pd on OS X)

[Adam Lindsay]

Hey PDers,

With all these discussions about performance, I was wondering if anyone
has played around with "reference" patches that could be used for the
sake of profiling. Would that be a useful thing, to come up with a patch
or a suite of patches that give PD a general, typical (if there could
possibly be such a thing) workout?

I believe chris clepper said this around Tue, 12 Nov 2002:

>>However, the performance of Aqua Tcl/Tk doesn't help things, either.
>>Controls like number boxes cause a bunch of screen-redraw interrupts that
>>are themselves greedy. Part of it is apparently AquaTk canvasses still
>>use QuickDraw.
>
>quickdraw should be ok as long as they don't pile on the CopyBits 
>which has become dog slow in OSX due to the double buffering.  i 
>wonder how many buffers each graphic object has using the wish shell? 
>one for tcl/wish + 2 for quartz?

Errr, I honestly couldn't tell you. Some time asking on the Tcl-Mac list
<tcl-mac at lists.sourceforge.net> would probably get you somewhere. They're
a helpful bunch.

>>I think there's a lot still to be optimized in the MacOSX port, though,
>>both in user experience and in performance. Chris Clepper wrote recently
>>about compiling with different optimization settings. Might be worth a
>>bit of experimentation...
>
>the -03 compiler setting gave slightly better performance but nothing 
>truly remarkable.  if i recall one of the main differences between 
>gcc -02 and -03 was the unrolling of loops??

That's about the size of it, as -O2 does optimizations where there isn't
a size-speed tradeoff, and -O3 does. I've noticed some places where
Miller has hand-unrolled stuff in the code, anyway.

Cheers,
adam

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 Adam Lindsay                  +44(0)1524 594 537
 atl at comp.lancs.ac.uk
 http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/atl/
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