[PD] abstraction penalty benchmarks

[Miller Puckette]

Here's a guess - I think each copy of the abstraction binds itself to
a symbol, "pd-<name>". Binding is fast bt unbinding is linear-time in the
number of things bound to the symbol... ouch.

There's a good reason to bind toplevels and named sub-patches to ther names,
but I think there's little reason to do it for abstractions - perhaps I can
take this out, but I'd have to leave it as an option for compatibility (ouch!)

Miller

On Thu, Aug 08, 2013 at 10:46:24PM -0400, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> On 08/08/2013 04:57 PM, Claude Heiland-Allen wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >Today I remembered one performance where I saved an abstraction with
> >many instances, bringing things to a halt.  So I benchmarked this
> >scenario and some similar ones - some seem to scale very badly.
> >
> >pure-data.git gcc-4.8.1 GNU/Linux/Debian/Wheezy amd64 64bit
> >Pd-0.45.0 ("test") compiled 17:10:02 Aug  8 2013
> >
> >m  n      open      dsp       save       close
> >3    512    38.503   1.33879     44.26       3.985
> >4   4096   324.507  10.7379     786.227    150.602
> >5  32768  2611.92   85.405    79234.2    35853
> >
> >key    description
> >m      number of levels of nested abstractions
> >n      total number of instances at deepest level
> >open   time to load patch
> >dsp    time to toggle dsp on then off (1000 runs averaged)
> >save   time to save one instance at deepest level
> >close  time to close patch
> >
> >all times are in ms, measured with [realtime]
> >rows run sequentially in their own pd instance
> >dsp was off at the start of each test
> >the whole run is in zero logical time
> >cpu frequency scaling was disabled (for real)
> >pd was run with -nogui -nosound -nrt
> >
> >The killer in the bottom right corner: with 8x as many abstractions, it
> >takes 100x as long to save an instance, and 200x as long to close the patch.
> >
> >See attached tarball if you want to try it yourself.
> 
> Thanks for the stats.
> 
> Any idea why "save" is so much greater than close + open?
> 
> Also, any idea what pd is doing for the bulk of that time when
> saving, closing, opening, and dsp'ing?
> 
> -Jonathan
> 
> >
> >
> >Claude
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >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