On OSX I use 'Activity Monitor' for quick check of CPU load and Shark.app for serious performance profiling, but for GNU/Linux I don't know a good equivalent of Shark. So on Debian I just start top, and for my live performance setup which does ~40% CPU load with Pd-extended 0.42, it is ~60% with 0.43. Top makes distinction between 'pdextended' and pd-gui, but heavy GUI use is reflected in increasing percentages for Xorg process as well. However, the load-increase with Pd-extended 0.43 is on account of the pdextended process (with my setups at least). Wish I could track that down to specific functions like with Shark.app.
In the case of OSX it was clearly the Apple dsp function calls consuming a great deal of CPU time, which could be avoided by using an external soundcard instead of the internal card, and Jack instead of PortAudio.
I've tried to use Oprofile on Debian, but this gives me a kernel failure soon as I start sampling. Does anyone know of a fine performance profiler for GNU/Linux?
Katja
On 5/4/12, Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at wrote:
I honestly don't know the cause, and haven't really checked on numbers. I mostly work on my four year old laptop, and test by running patches I know (solitude is a good test of heavy CPU usage, it won't run on a machine less than 1.6GHz, from my experience).
As for drawing operations like anti-aliasing, those would not show up in the 'pd' process, but rather the 'pd-gui' process, since that's the Tk part.
Are you seeing the CPU increase in the 'pd' process? How are you measuring this?
.hc
On May 4, 2012, at 9:31 AM, katja wrote:
Hello,
I've installed Pd-extended 0.43 versions (Linux and OSX) from the autobuilds several times in the past year. The latest builds seem to work fine in many aspects, but they are still so CPU-hungry: ~ 50% more than Pd-extended 0.42. How come?
A while ago, the new PortAudio version was blamed (http://www.mail-archive.com/pd-list@iem.at/msg50357.html). Indeed, using Jack solves the load difference for OSX.
But on Debian I also observe a 50% load increase for the new Pd-extended. No matter if ALSA or Jack is used. Does anyone have similar observations with Linux builds?
BTW, I'm happy with Tk 8.5's antialiased font! Initially, I feared that antialiasing was responsible for increased load on Debian, but disabling GUI updates did not make noticeable difference. It seems that antialiasing is done rather efficiently, the performance drop must be somewhere else.
Katja
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