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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Networking has a lot of latency and jitter, so not so good for  
realtime audio.  As for manually managing pd~, I mean just manually  
creating as many pd~ instances as you have cores.

.hc

On Sep 9, 2009, at 5:06 AM, fred-ordi wrote:

> 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
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pd-list at iem.at mailing list
>> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pd-list at iem.at mailing list
> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list



----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three  
meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds,  
and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.      - Martin  
Luther King, Jr.