Re: [linux-audio-dev] Re: costs of IPC

[Paul Davis]

>Thats all very well, but I suspect that a lot of apps will needa lot more
>memory than that, certainly anything doing convolution, or a software
>sampler. If a process goes and mallocs a few dozen meg to keep samples in,
>what will happen? How does heap size affect context switch time?

heap size by itself isn't an issue, all that matters is how much
memory is actually touched during each execution of the process
between context switches.

and its not as bad as you think, since programs like software samplers
will likely be feeding audio data from disk into a ringbuffer. even
though the ringbuffer may be large, each invocation by the engine will
only touch a fairly small amount of it.

i don't know enough about convolution and other DSP algorithms to
sense their memory footprint. do you have any thoughts?

--p