Monitoring MaxMSP's real use (ram / cpu)

tep's icon

I wonder how does MaxMSP really manage the memory and cpu.

I would like to be able to monitor MaxMSP's actual cpu use, not (only) the DSP one ... Is there a way of doing such a thing without a 3rd party software ? And for the memory use ?

As i suppose the performances of Max emptying / fulling the computer's memory is somehow related to the computer's gear, i'd like to monitor it in my patch in order to make "statistics" instead of the tedious way of watching my activity monitor and manually write down the values evolving in time ....

hans w. koch's icon

if you are on mac, you could use the shell external and send it the "top" command.
(try it out in the terminal before, to see, what it all gives).
with a bit of parsing you can extract memory usage and all kind of other statistics.

tep's icon

Hahahaa the shell :/

Oh i won't sleep very much

thank you

maxista's icon

Slightly on a different note, does anybody have suggestions for improving the performance of a patch? I have something fairly complex but it's not doing any audio, mostly MIDI and OSC. I am seeing RAM usage up to 650MB and CPU at 20-30%.

T Bruce's icon

Has anyone had luck using aka.shell to monitor Max realtime memory usage? I tried sending it the "top" command which works in Terminal, but aka.shell just says "no result" This is my first time using aka.shell, so I may be missing something really obvious. Any help very much appreciated.

Max 5.1.9
OS X 10.8.5