[PD] implications of pd~ for 'poly' objects

fred-ordi ordi at fredvoisin.com
Wed Sep 9 11:06:06 CEST 2009


Sorry if this question is obvious, may be an alternate for live audio 
processing with clusters:
does it exist some netsend/netreceive for audio in Puredata ?
I remember having using one (experimental) few years ago but was within 
MaxMSP...

fred


IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
> Phil Stone wrote:
>> Hi Hans,
>>
>> Thanks for replying.  I don't quite understand what you mean by 
>> "manually manage".  As far as I know, without something like [pd~], 
>> there's no way to divide up and assign the Pd audio process to more 
>> than one core.  Half of the cores on a quad-core are therefore useless 
>> to Pd (accounting for the fact that the graphical process gets its own 
>> core).
>>
> 
> the problem is, that poly-class objects are usually meant for _many_ 
> objects (10+; i'm only repeating here what hans has already said).
> [pd~] will fork a new thread for each of it's instances.
> when doing multi-core processing (and this is really the only thing pd~ 
> is good for; e.g .it's not good if you want to have different priorities 
> / asynchronous processing), you usually don't want to create more 
> threads than you have cores.
> why? performance reasons! if you create e.g. 1000 threads for 1000 
> instances of [doodle~] on a quad-core machine, your computer will spend 
> more time handling context-switches and the like (that is: the overhead 
> for managing the threads) than doing the actual job.
> as a rule of thumb, the optimum number of threads is about the number of 
> cores you want to use.
> 
> since what is sold to customers as "multi-core" processors usually does 
> not involve more than 4 cores, the "best" (though probably not the most 
> comfortable) way to assign work to the cores from within Pd is doing it 
> "manually"
> 
> 
> fmgasdr.#
> IOhannes
> 
> 
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