I have a patch that uses more than 100 phasor~ objects.
They all have line~ and *~ objects turning their amplitudes up and down, off and on.
The patch uses 46% of my pretty nice mac pro CPU.
Is there a way to make a osc~ or phasor~ object stop oscillating when not in use?
Perhaps there is a strategy one could use to turn off whole abstractions.
I am trying to make my program more efficient. Any ideas?

a.d.

Hans, this rocks!

After looking at the video and the Reware site, I want to play too, but before I start, I would like to know if the PDA will be ballzee enough to run my larger patches. (maybe some are better faster than others)

Will it run a patch with 10 oscillators? 20? 100? Is there some kind of benchmark that is commonly used?

I've been building effects and synths for a set of people who aren't necessarily interested in playing on stage with a computer so I want to find smaller simpler dedicated gadgets.

On the Reware site I saw some stuff about the Beagle Board. Does anyone know if I can make an all purpose pure data player out of a beagle board and an arduino board? Obviously, I would have to rewrite the patches to be controlled by the arduino. Maybe a small display, or not, but will it work for big full blown synths with lots of settings and samples?

WOW! that worked.
48% down to about 14%, that's pretty significant.

Incidentally, because of the design of my patch, I had a choice between putting one switch~ object in every instance of an abstraction containing 5 phasors and 5 line objects, (1 switch per 5 phasors)

or

adding five switch~ objects in five pd phasorsandwitch subpatches. (1 switch per phasor)

I tried both ways and came out with no significant difference.

...so, that must mean that the switch~ object itself uses some CPU when being turned on and off on the fly. Use it only for stuff that is turned on or off as a setting rather than during actual performance.

Cool!!! is there any place I can find other random tips on optimizing complex PD patches? I'm sure there are other things I can do. Eventually I hope to deploy this on a very small linux machine.

a.d.