[PD] os x realtime not under root.

cgc at humboldtblvd.com cgc at humboldtblvd.com
Mon Sep 15 17:57:50 CEST 2003


Quoting Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org>:

> 
> Its not necessarily slower, since it doesn't change the CPU.  This just
> 
> allows you to use the -realtime flag, which gives Pd elevated execution
> 
> priority on the CPU.  This means that it is harder to interrupt Pd and
> 
> it will be allowed to use more of the CPU time.  IMHO, I think this 
> mostly affects dropouts and glitches, since Pd won't be interrupted as
> 
> often by other processes (Aqua being a likely culprit since it uses a 
> lot of CPU and runs at an elevated priority).  But its possible that it
> 
> could speed things up a little bit.
> 

OSX schedules time slices by thread not task, which is where the problems come
in to play with pd.  elevating the task priority of pd won't help at bit if the
gui functions still take to long to execute in the pd task and don't leave time
for the audio.  the best (and probably final) solution to the problem is to put
the audio and gui in separate threads so they can be scheduled separately.  this
is the _only_ way to schedule time slicing with reasonable results on OSX. 
again, every major piece of audio software already does this which is why Logic,
Pro Tools, SuperCollider, etc are not effected by GUI actions like pd.  

cgc




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