[PlanetCCRMA] Denormals info required

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano nando@ccrma.Stanford.EDU
Mon Aug 1 17:09:02 2005


On Mon, 2005-08-01 at 13:39, nigel henry wrote:
> Hi folks. I left Soundtracker on all night after saving my work, and the 
> following morning saw it hogging 100% CPU. Fernando was talking about 
> denormals on an app a while back.

I found this a while back and was useful:
http://www.musicdsp.org/files/denormal.pdf

> Is this likely to be a denormals problem on Soundtracker? 

Hard to tell. 

> It was totally locked up, no doubt to it taking all the CPU. 

It could also be a memory leak, the app starts using all memory and then
goes into swap hell (everything starts going to swap and the machine
slows down to a virtual halt). 

-- Fernando

> I'd just like to know a bit about denormals if someone could enlighten me. 
> Also Specimen was hogging CPU before the latest upgrade. Was that a denormals 
> problem, or just a bug in the program? Just trying to learn a bit more. 
> Nigel.
> 
> Soundtracker was run on Debian Sarge on testing (Etch) repo.
> I'll try soundtracker overnight on FC2. Totally planetccrma.
> I'll also try it on Debian, playing a track allnight and see if the problem is 
> still there in the morning. ( Not through the sound system, as it will 
> probably get a bit monotonous)