laserpilot

I'll just jump right into the issue. My video performance patch has about 30 different slabs in it..some of them are simple and some of them use several slabs together to create one effect.

One issue I've been having lately is that some combination of what I'm doing when practicing (luckily hasn't happened live yet) ends up dropping the framerate from 30 to a constant 5fps and it seems like if I turn off the metro and let it sit for a few seconds it will go back to normal. Unfortunately, I can't determine what I end up doing that results in the framerate drop...

I control the slab chain by just using simple gates but I don't know if there is some better way to do it. The drop in framerate persists even when I'm sure that every effect is off via the gates.

Does it take some time for some image processing cache to clear?

Should I set up an enable message to go into each individual slab and then toggle all of those on and off in sequence until i find the culprit? Or would 'dispose' be more final? I'm not sure if theres somewhere I can look in the activity monitor or something like that to see what the processor hog is... I know jitter stores the slabs each time theyre loaded up, but maybe I need a way to temporarily load and reload

Any clues would be amazing..I have a show on friday and I'd prefer not to step back to an old version of my patch

Does it take some time for some image processing cache to clear? 

Any clues would be amazing..I have a show on friday and I'd prefer not to step back to an old version of my patch


efficient-way-to-debug-slab-chain

Another clue is that it seems to be linked to some CPU usage when I'm playing music in iTunes..the song will start skipping and then my framerate sits at around 3 or 4 but will jump back up if I wait a little bit and turn everything back on.

Just asking again if theres a simple way to clear the cache of loaded slabs once they have been instantiated in case this comes up in some live situation..

This could also be due to my now 4 yr old computer...

Another clue is that it seems to be linked to some CPU usage when I'm playing music in iTunes..the song will start skipping and then my framerate sits at around 3 or 4 but will jump back up if I wait a little bit and turn everything back on. 

This could also be due to my now 4 yr old computer...


Luckily my problem hasn't popped up again, and now I'm on a new computer. Not sure why it took me so long to notice, but in the Apple Developer tools there is the super useful OpenGL Driver Monitor within graphics tools that lets you see what is going on with your GPU in real time as you play with your Jitter patch.

I haven't figured out the best attributes to monitor yet, but "Current video memory in use" seems to be a good one to watch. If anyone has any other tips for this tool, I'd like to hear them.

Does anyone know if the included OpenGL profiler is only for certain homemade apps/quartz apps? It doesnt seem to want to link to Max/MSP but I'm not sure what it would do if it did.

EDIT: Oops..got it to attach, just had to start Max with it..the Trace seems like a good place to look if I'm ever getting a hang, but I'd have to know what I'm looking for I suppose

Luckily my problem hasn't popped up again, and now I'm on a new computer. Not sure why it took me so long to notice, but in the Apple Developer tools there is the super useful OpenGL Driver Monitor within graphics tools that lets you see what is going on with your GPU in real time as you play with your Jitter patch. 

EDIT: Oops..got it to attach, just had to start Max with it..the Trace seems like a good place to look if I'm ever getting a hang, but I'd have to know what I'm looking for I suppose


Efficient way to debug slab chain?