[chuck-users] CPU performance and Jack

[Kassen]

Hey Matt,

> So, I'm doing a bit of heavier crunching and was wondering what aspects of
> CPU performance are the most critical the JACK's DSP percentage?  I've not
> been able to find a very clear answer and was wondering if this group might
> know?

I can understand the question; I've seen it asked more times too and
indeed answers are hard to come by. Personally I tend to ignore it (I
tend to use jack from the terminal, started from scripts) and see
where the cpu usage is going using "htop", which will tell you about
more resources too and in a more straightforward way.

> Does running the dual core version of JACK make more sense with a
> slightly slower processor, or is speed the real winner in this case?  To
> clarify, I'm basically just heavily crunching incoming audio.  Thanks for
> any insight!

Assuming your cpu is a multi-core (or at least multi-threaded) one I'd
guess that it can't hurt. Generally I'd expected ChucK to take up most
of one core and the jack process(s) would end up elsewhere with the
rest. Most likely your bottleneck is ChucK's cpu load, though to what
degree this results in issues like dropouts may be affected by other
high priority processes taking up cpu time in bursts.

To summarise; streamline your ChucK code and try to avoid running
cpu-hungry tasks while ChucKing.

Hope that helps a bit.

Yours,
Kas.