hi all,
having a firewall will affect the pd/gui communication as long as a network socket is used. having a network socket will be a low latency issue unless the network communication is done in a separate thread ...
the best advice here is though. Perhaps drop the buffer size on the audio card down and then reduce latency to just longer than the buffer size? A 1028 sample buffer is equivalent to just under 24 ms (44.1). I run at about 20 ms latency with 512 sample buffer (44.1) just to be safe. I suppose I could get the latency down smaller say 10 ms by using a 256 sample buffer but I haven't tried that yet.
the current implementation of pablio (that's used for asio / coreaudio) is really bad ... i haven't been able to run safely below 25 ms of latency ... in devel, there is an implementation of a callback-driven scheduler, that directly talks to portaudio without using pablio, giving MUCH better latencies ...
if you need lowest latencies, i'd suggest, you try devel :-)
cheers ... tim