[PD] Very large patches unstable?

[Matteo Sisti Sette]

> I've certainly used patches with
> 500-1000 abstraction instances without problem, I guess I
> haven't tried 4600.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if the "limit" (i.e. the point where
things begins not working) were somwhere between the two numbers.

I had a lot of problems with very big patches, and a lot of times things
that worked perfectly fine with a "dimension" N stopped working with
N+1, where by "dimension" I mean just the "quantity of things" (e.g.
instances of a same abstraction), without the smallest change in
"complexity".
In some cases some developer (I won't tell the name, but it's someone
very important here) was able to find specific bugs and fixed it and 
published a new release.

Unfortunately PD becomes somewhat unreliable if not unstable, when 
patches get really big. That's very frustrating, because the way it is 
'defined' (i.e. the way it is supposed to work) really allows beautiful, 
  complex, scalable design; but the implementation doesn't support it at 
the end. Also, these kind of bugs are very difficult to isolate.

The greatest frustration is when you carefully design something so that 
size (e.g. number of instances) shouldn't be a problem, you strongly 
test it within a certain 'size' and verify it is rock-solid, and then, 
when you have everything working and your project grows a little bit and 
you just add a couple more instances of something, it stasrts crashing....



-- 
Matteo Sisti Sette
matteosistisette at gmail.com
http://www.matteosistisette.com