[PD] JACK affects UDP rate

[Christof Ressi]

Hmmm... in the jack backend there is no ring buffer. Jack just dumps a 
large buffer from the audio callback and notifies the Pd audio thread, 
which consumes the buffer in chunks of 64 samples.

I think you could just copy the port audio backend implementation with 
its lock-free ringbuffer. This would also solve the socket polling issue :-)

Maybe the "polling scheduler" part could even be moved out of 
"s_audio_pa.c" and shared with the jack backend.

---

On the other hand, I've been wondering if the "Delay" parameter is 
actually necessary at all. As the Jack backend demonstrates, you can 
just as well use a larger hardware buffer size. The only advantages I 
see are:

* latency can be controlled at a finer granularity; hardware buffer 
sizes are usually power-of-2s, so there's no step between 11.6 ms (512 
samples) and 23.3 ms (1024 samples), for example.

* the latency can be set arbitrarily high while the hardware buffer size 
is limited (often 1024 samples)

Unfortunately, very few people actually seem to understand the 
difference between the "block size" (= hardware buffer size) and the 
"Delay" in Pd's audio settings and how they interact... But maybe that's 
just because of the lack of documentation. After all, I only understood 
it after reading the code :-)

Christof

On 24.07.2021 03:05, Miller Puckette wrote:
> Aha.. I've been meaning to look at why jack doesn't respond to audio latency
> setting... I think it needs fooling with.
>
> cheers
> M
>
> On Sat, Jul 24, 2021 at 01:01:43AM +0200, Christof Ressi wrote:
>> Hi Miller,
>>
>>> As I understand it, when Pd is idle (finishes a 64-sample block and can't yet
>>> crunch the following one), then it goes back and re-checks for network or
>>> GUI input, and keeps doing that until either there isn't anything to read or
>>> else the next block becomes runnable.
>> AFAICT, that's true for pa_send_dacs(), but not for jack_send_dacs(). The
>> former calls sys_microsleep() in a loop, so it will only actually sleep if
>> there are no more sockets to read; the latter immediately blocks on a
>> condition variable if the buffer is not available.
>>
>>> I need to add some sort of poll-it-again functionality to libpd but haven't
>>> figured out what shape it should take yet.
>> Since libpd manages the audio callback, the client can simply call
>> sys_pollgui() as often as they want/need. I don't think that you actually
>> have to add anything. Maybe just add a more fitting alias, like sys_poll()
>> or sys_pollsockets()? sys_pollgui() is really a misnomer...
>>
>> Christof
>>
>>> So this is a simple throttling
>>> mechanism.  (And it's not necessary to put this on another thread).
>>>
>>> However, in the context of libpd thre's no concept of "idle" and so in that
>>> setup there's only one network read per block.
>>>
>>> And yes, this can lead to delays since the Macintosh helpfully stores unread
>>> packets until the reading process gets around to realding them.  I think that
>>> also only happens in the context of libpd.
>>>
>>> I need to add some sort of poll-it-again functionality to libpd but haven't
>>> figured out what shape it should take yet.
>>>
>>> Miller