Hey folks,
I'm slightly ignorant of technical issues such as this, so bare with me.
Recently, PureData has been using a lot more CPU than it used to and it starts to really heat up my comp. Its a relatively new MacBook Pro (1year old). My patches have become slightly more complex, but I used to be able to run multiple patches at once with no CPU problem.
Any ideas of solutions, causes or anything else?
Let me know. I would appreciate it.
Morgan

the classic culprit would be gui objects getting updated too frequently. pd's gui is notoriously slow and it is best to avoid gui objects whenever possible.

another one that used to get me was using [vline~] in patches that have been switched off with [switch~] . i'm not sure if that problem has been fixed yet or not, but it used to eat up a lot of cpu.

other than that, a good way to dubug is to use a cpu meter (there is one in the top menu of pd), and then start deleting parts of your patch. when the cpu drops suddenyl, you know you have found a cpu waster.

i like the idea of deleting things until i find something that drops my CPU. thanks.

can you give me an example of using switch~ . i'm interested in this now.

in OSX you can also use the system monitor, it is in apps/utilities to see how much cpu PD is using. A way to see if the gui is what is killing you is to watch how the system monitor changes when you minimize a patch. On my quad core i5 I saw the cpu go from 70% down to 3% when i minimized a patch, so that gives you an idea of how inefficient the gui is, this is with the audio still running, so 3% of cpu for sound 67% for gui. I have since then started making my guis more sparse.