That’s with no apps other than Max5 running, and only that one patch open. With audio off, Activity Monitor is still showing that Max is using 25% cpu. Bearing in mind that this patch is about 95% MSP, with a very minimal interface (and all buffers empty), that seems very strange to me.

I’m using 10 instances of elasticindex~ (autosmooth setting IS off, but they still account for a lot of the processing), but it appears that Max is using what seems to be a massive percentage of my cpu. Even with audio off and no patches open, it is still showing 20% in Activity Monitor.

Does this seem strange to anyone else?

It’s not a massive issue for me at the moment, just an observation.

All things considered, I’m learning that 10 channels of granular phrase sample-munging is not particularly kind to my laptop……never mind.

Not sure Jean-Marc,

I have an old powerbook g4 (single core) and I’ve always had the same question.

Why does activity monitor show a different % than in Max’s DSP ?

phil

But at the same time Max is doing lots of other stuff – all the non-MSP things, messages, UI, its internal workings and much more… Activity monitor also shows you all of this.

And yes, Max does use your cores. You have the main thread, the high priority thread if you have overdrive on, the DSP thread and one or more threads if you have a poly~ @parallel 1. Potentially, each thread runs on a different core or processor.

If this sounds mysterious, and you want an in-depth look on the subject, there’s a great article by JKC

http://cycling74.com/2004/09/09/event-priority-in-max-scheduler-vs-queue/#more-604

Hope this helps…
aa

I’m surprised Apple hasn’t documented this better, but from a third party source:

http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-MonitoringTips.html

Of course, that’s only one reason why there is a discrepancy. Andrea’s post explains the rest.