[PD] [failsafe] to save you when Pd pegs the CPU

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Nov 13, 2006, at 7:55 PM, derek holzer wrote:

> Hi HC,
>
> Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
> > I wrote [failsafe].  When the CPU is pegged, it first tries  
> turning off
> > the DSP (this could also easily turn off Gem rendering).  If that  
> fails,
> > it will quit Pd, thus saving the poor machine the hard reset.
>
> usually if I'm working on something "risky" I just assign a key (or  
> MIDI control) to toggle DSP on and off in case of CPU overload. I  
> wouldn't want PD to quit on me with unsaved work, however, so I'm  
> not too sure about that function in your [failsafe]. One can always  
> SSH into the laptop and kill PD as well...

Ctrl-. turns off DSP and Ctrl-/ turns it on (Cmd on the Mac).

The only time that the automatic quit would be called is when Pd has  
pegged the CPU so bad that you loose interactivity.  Then ssh or  
anything else won't help you.  This can happen quite easily when  
running heavy Gem patches using the realtime flag on older  
computers.  It can also happen with a ton of audio processing.  The  
idea is that Pd will quit itself rather than you having to power- 
cycle the computer.  Either way the unsaved data would be lost, but I  
think you'll agree that it is good to avoid hard resets.

I am sure that some fine tuning of [failsafe] will be needed.  But  
basically, right now, it'll quit Pd if the machine is unresponsive  
for 10 seconds.  That probably should be longer.  Also, there might  
need to be platform-specific numbers for this patch.  I only tested  
this on Mac OS X.

.hc


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