It seems that as soon as I turn off DSP or try to close a patch, pd becomes totally unresponsive and goes to to 100% CPU usage. I have to force quit the application, and then it still leaves a zombie process that continues to use 100% CPU until I kill it.

Anyone experienced this or have any insight??

Thank you!

I've not experienced this, but I have had similar freezing issues with supercollider on Mojave. In addition, when compiling Tcl/Tk 8.5.9 from source there are issues.. not sure if any of these things are related

@jacoblast I’m using the same setup (Mojave + 0.49-1). I find it to be pretty stable in general, and definitely more so than the combination I started with years ago (Lion + Pd-extended, vanilla 0.46-6). Back in those days, I had something similar to what you’re describing happen a lot, where Pd would freeze and a zombie process would gobble 100% of the CPU until I would manually kill it. I never did track down the absolute cause, but I suspect it might have been a tcl issue due to my inadvisably-huge GUI for my patch. I don’t recall opening/closing patches or switching DSP to be a problem, though.

I suppose if I were troubleshooting this now I’d ask myself:
-does it happen with any particular patch?
-could it be an external library that I’m loading?
-am I running any other audio software that might be locking up Pd?

I believe you can start Pd from the command line with flags that post errors to the terminal, but I don’t remember offhand... I think -stderr is one (?), but can’t remember specifically at the moment. Maybe that could give you some insight into what’s happening once Pd hangs?

after this I discovered that the root cause of the supercollider problems was a code-signing issue hopefully it's not the same in Pd (doesn't seem like it)

Thank you for the suggestions. I tried running with no externals loading, with different audio configurations and everything. I finally deleted the preferences file and that fixed the problem! I don't know what the cause was in the end :\ But at least I have working Pd now