On Wed, 2013-08-07 at 08:40 +0200, IOhannes m zmölnig wrote:
On 08/07/13 03:15, Miller Puckette wrote:
Hmmm... I was umnder the impression that, except for the overhead of block~ and switch~ objects, there would be no difference in DSP execution time between a patch having lots of subpatches and one with the same amount of computation all thrown in one window. I haven't made any measurements but theoreticall at least there shouldn't be any difference.
i once did make measurements, and they showed that your assumption is correct.
or at least, it showed that it *was* correct at that time. this was on a P2-400MHz in 1998 or so, where a 16 channel spatialization patch would eat about 95% of the CPU - regardless of whether you used a single huge patch or organized the code into subpatches/abstractions.
eventually i went for using abstractions, and let the PC run at 95% for the 2 weeks show.
I once made some informal tests to measure the overhead of [switch~]. It turned out it is quite big and if you're running hundreds or thousands instances of [switch~] you probably gain nothing by turning DSP off in subpatches. I don't know what the sweet spot is it seems using [switch~] is only worth for subpatches with a minimum amount of (DSP) complexity.
Roman