Hi Matt,
both problems are well known. On OSX, the Coreaudio interface is quite CPU hungry. Using Jack is recommended. Myself and others have posted several times about this.
And as far as the GUI goes, I've been bringing this issue up for years now. You can check the archives yourself and see. In short, PD's GUI is slower on OSX than any other OS. The solutions which are often suggested to me when I complain about this are a) use less GUI objects, b) become a developer and fix it yourself and c) use Linux. I chose the last, and found that my patches ran 50% better using Linux on the same Powerbook.
best, d.
Matt Barber wrote:
If I am having PD run through coreaudio, either built-in or through a firewire interface, the cpu usage jumps to a consistently high 25% to 50% just by clicking "compute audio."
Then, if I connect to jack (using jackpilot), computing audio shows no huge jump in cpu, so that problem disappears.
The other problem is that any vu meters connected to [env~] -- even running at 16384 -- will make the "Pd" or "Pd-extended" processes (not the "pd" process as before) jump to between 15% and 30%, but the corresponding jump does not show up in pd's cpu loadmeter.