On Nov 13, 2006, at 7:55 PM, derek holzer wrote:
Hi HC,
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I wrote [failsafe]. When the CPU is pegged, it first tries
turning off
the DSP (this could also easily turn off Gem rendering). If that
fails,
it will quit Pd, thus saving the poor machine the hard reset.
usually if I'm working on something "risky" I just assign a key (or
MIDI control) to toggle DSP on and off in case of CPU overload. I
wouldn't want PD to quit on me with unsaved work, however, so I'm
not too sure about that function in your [failsafe]. One can always
SSH into the laptop and kill PD as well...
Ctrl-. turns off DSP and Ctrl-/ turns it on (Cmd on the Mac).
The only time that the automatic quit would be called is when Pd has
pegged the CPU so bad that you loose interactivity. Then ssh or
anything else won't help you. This can happen quite easily when
running heavy Gem patches using the realtime flag on older
computers. It can also happen with a ton of audio processing. The
idea is that Pd will quit itself rather than you having to power-
cycle the computer. Either way the unsaved data would be lost, but I
think you'll agree that it is good to avoid hard resets.
I am sure that some fine tuning of [failsafe] will be needed. But
basically, right now, it'll quit Pd if the machine is unresponsive
for 10 seconds. That probably should be longer. Also, there might
need to be platform-specific numbers for this patch. I only tested
this on Mac OS X.
.hc
Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic.
It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and
expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war
on terrorism. - retired U.S. Army general, William Odom