[PD] os x performance

tigital tigital at mac.com
Tue Sep 16 00:18:52 CEST 2003


On Monday, September 15, 2003, at 02:20  PM, Amos Elmaliah wrote:

> hi list,
> more OSX question; on what mostly does the performance level of pd 
> rely? tk / compiler / actual code ?
> amos.

hi amos,

...by what do you mean performance?  It is very easy to create an 
unusable patch by incorporating lots of number output boxes, or other 
visual feedback, and this is a cross-platform problem of using 
Tcl/Tk...however, as I mentioned previously, the specific 
implementation of Tk on OSX is based on quickdraw calls, which incur a 
huge penalty due to conversion of xrgb to argb pixels when redrawing 
parts of the screen;  simple examples using only two number output 
boxes have been posted, showing that the "wish shell" hungrily takes up 
~80% cpu, of which ~30-40% come from the pixel conversion (and that is 
using an altivec algorithm, to boot!)...

...I don't know of anyone successfully compiling pd or GEM on OSX using 
a compiler other than gcc, but it seems to be pretty well known that we 
could expect "faster" code; how much faster would be a total guess...

...as a last thought, it seems that alot of people new to pd, GEM, or 
any other program are concerned with making it as fast as possible;  
but this just reminds me of the old addage about "premature 
optimization is the hobgoblin of programming"...meaning it's better to 
get something working, then worry about performance improvements, if 
necessary...I've found that some pretty amazing stuff can be 
accomplished with pd/GEM, even with the current caveats ;-)

l8r,
jamie





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