[PD] Very large patches unstable?

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

I'm currently working heavy on a patch that has 100ish abstractions  
that loads 1.1gigs of samples into memory, and it hasn't crashed yet.   
It does certainly take a couple minutes to load tho.  But once it  
loads, I can work for days without restarting the patch, even thru  
putting the computer to sleep.  I'm running Pd-extended 0.42.5-20091112.

One thing I have noticed is that there was no feedback that the patch  
is loading.  Pd just stops responding while loading the patch.  This  
could be interpreted as a crash, but its not.  Wait, and it'll  
eventually load.  And I added a "watch" mouse cursor for Pd-extended  
when its loading, so that should help communicate that Pd is busy  
loading.

As for shortening load times, Claude wrote code for caching  
abstractions which dramatically speeds things up, that would be nice  
to have, but it is also tricky to do. What's more important, faster  
load times or less bugs?  That's my concern.

.hc


On Dec 2, 2009, at 6:51 AM, cyrille henry wrote:

> hello,
>
> i made some patch that use 98454 abstractions.
> it certainly is very long to load, and almost impossible to save.
> but if your are patient, pd vanilla is solid like a rock.
>
> Cyrille
>
>
> Stephen Lucas a écrit :
>> 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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