Hello.

I have a few 8 minute 16bit stereo wav files I want to load into pd. So I set my read flags to [read -maxsize 3e+07 -resize ...blah blah blah( and everything loads dandy, works fine.

Only, in total there are 467MB of sample data to load into PD allocated memory. My only concern is about being able to play this abstraction safely (crash-free in a live environment) from my netbook (of 2 gig RAM) and limited CPU.

On the big and beastly mac Activity Monitor shows pd to to have eaten up about 900MB RAM with around 1.2GB in virtual memory. This goes up and down according to how much I actually load in.

So my worries are, why the 900MB of RAM use? is that because its upsampling the 16bit into internal 24 or 32bit processing? And the Virtual memory, that's only requested by PD as a precaution isn't it? And provided there is sufficient RAM, no disk swapping will take place, will it?

Performance is lovely. I'm just worried about pushing the -maxsize so far.

On a side note, think about how much having this sampling power would have cost only 10/20 years ago!! (or the size the computer would have had to have been... netbook! pah!)

I'm not all that familiar with the behind-the-scenes aspect of Pd, but it does do 32-bit floating point internal processing. That's going to double the word length of a 16-bit sample, which looks about on par with the memory being allocated on your Activity Monitor. Also, if you have any delay lines, those are going to eat a little bit of memory, though unless you have ridiculously long delays, it's likely negligable. I don't really know anything about virtual memory or disk swapping, so maybe someone else can chime in on that.

Thanks Maelstorm.

Also, for future readers with similar concerns, I just remembered that 32-bit machines will only be able to access a maximum of 4GB RAM at best... I know that windoze users may allocate only 2-3GB per program, depending on OS settings). I don't know how Pd will react when faced with a RAM overload though!

I have to say, on my 64 PPC 1.8Ghz G5 Mac I have not suffered a single problem or audio dropout (other than normal) e.t.c. and playback has worked flawlessly for a large number of hours. so I'm convinced