Hello everyone!

I have a very important performance coming up. I have a pd patch which dynamically creates audio loop patches, and so I am worried about pd running into cpu resource issues. presently, pd reports the patch running with 22% cpu usage, but that will increase with each new dynamic patch, and i'm also running an arduino with an rfid shield, which will be sending data to the pd patch.

Can anyone recommend some things to do in order to optimize my computer?

I have an apple macbook pro. OSX Lion. 8GB 1333 MHz RAM. 2GHz Intel i7 Processor.

I'm Running the audio at 48KHz using an Apogee Duet 2.

So I'm wondering about whether freeing up hardware space, removing programs, if there are any background programs i can disable temporarily for the performance, etc.?

Thanks!

Michael

Do you need the interface layer? That is - are you using graphical controls to control the patch or using graphical objects for visual feedback? If not, or if you can move any of that to hardware or console output, you could run PD in nogui mode to save some cycles.

The place running in nogui really shines is in a linux console environment though - if you want to partition your mac and install a stripped down debian with just what you need to run your patch from the console in nogui mode, you'd cut the overhead from the windowing enviroment that you'll be stuck with under macosx.

That said, I'd try looking at performance optimizations in your patch itself first if you think there may be room for improvements!