[PD] Very large patches unstable?

[Stephen Lucas]

I'm experiencing some instability with a patch that is very large.

Basically, I have an abstraction that does some calculations between a send
and receive, whose names are controlled by the creation arguments of the
abstraction.

I made a little patch to create 68x68 of these (yes, I really need that
many), and correctly place them on the canvas so that they don't overlap
graphically. As far as I can tell, they all created fine and I even managed
to save the patch. I did use a text editor to manually increase the size of
the canvas, since message based object creation will not automatically
resize the canvas if something will be past the bounds of the canvas.

I've been getting inconsistant problems (crashing) with what I can only
assume is an issue with a patch this large (4624 objects). If I understand
things correctly, these abstractions do not have any DSP objects and should
not be consuming large quantities of system resources if they're just
hanging around, waiting to be used. I suspect the problem may mainly be
linked to actually looking at the patch, which I don't need to do, but I
don't feel confident using a patch that is always cheating death. If I don't
look at the patch and just load it as an abstraction in another patch, it
seems much more stable, but still takes a long time to create, delete, open,
or close.

Has anyone else seen this problem and am I crazy for trying to do this? In
Max I probably would have tried to approach this using poly~, but I don't
know any objects in pd that have similar methods of creating several
instances of an abstraction. If this is simply a problem of having a very
large canvas, I could compartmentalize the abstractions to solve that.

Thanks to anyone who puts in their 2cents.

-Stephen
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