I've asked questions about this before and gotten some nice help from you folks.

My recent dilemma is that PD uses on lot of CPU when I check my activity monitor, but using very little in my load meter. ANy ideas of what could cause this inconsistency. It really starts to heat up my computer and it seems really unnecessary as the load meter is telling me i'm using very little CPU.

Any help is appreciated.

I'm more inclined to trust the activity monitor or running top from the command line than the load meter patch. At least with those you can see if it is Pd or something else that is sucking up the cpu.

Narrowed it down to the use of abstractions. Still troubleshooting, but making progress. Do folks generally always keep a patch and all abstractions in one folder so they are reading from the same place? Does that help CPU usage?

Thanks for any help

The location of the abstractions only affects the load time of the patch. I believe Pd checks the directory of the parent patch first, so keeping your abstractions there should speed up loading. But it won't affect the CPU usage while the patch is running since once everything is loaded, it's all in RAM. The only exception, I think, is when reading files from disk in real-time as in [readsf~].