[PD] pd and multi-core processors

Roman Haefeli reduzierer at yahoo.de
Wed Apr 7 10:21:42 CEST 2010


On Wed, 2010-04-07 at 02:02 +0200, tim vets wrote:
> 
> 
> 2010/4/6 Tim Blechmann <tim at klingt.org>
>         > With my patch open i get these values (average):
>         > cpu1 60% cpu2 60% cpu3 11% cpu4 2%
>         > Then, when I open a pd~ patch:
>         > cpu1 80% cpu2 80% cpu3 40% cpu4 3%
>         
>         
>         the average cpu load won't tell you a lot, since the cpu speed
>         is usually
>         not constant, but may be modulated (adding some latency
>         hotspots). in
>         general, i'd recommend to disable frequency scaling, turbo
>         mode (for nehalem
>         cpus) and smt, since it may confuse numbers and can increase
>         the thread
>         wakeup latency significantly, if you want to use a machine for
>         low-latency
>         real-time audio applications.
> 
> 
> thanks for the tip. I have no idea how to do that though.
> I admit not having searched for very long (it's late), but i couldn't
> find an easy peasy how-to disable frequency scaling,

on ubuntu usually:
$ sudo cpufreq-selector -g performance

I guess this is the same as overriding the sysctl files in:
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/cpufreq on modern linuxes.

I don't know about the default kernel, but in the realtime kernel
running applications with realtime privileges (for instance pd -rt) and
dynamic cpu frequency scaling doesn't work well together, so I guess one
is better off by disabling it. I tend to believe that cpu frequency
scaling fails to adapt when 'pd -rt' requires it, because Pd has such a
high priority, even higher than the governor controlling the scaling.
When using other (low priority) applications, gcc for instance, scaling
works as expected.


Roman




		
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