How expensive is it to create an NSAutoreleasePool

Question

I have a method which needs to run in its own thread 88 times per second (it's a callback for an audio unit.) Should I avoid creating an NSAutoreleasePool each time it's called?

Answer 1

Creating the NSAutoReleasePool itself shouldn't be too slow, but if there are a lot of objects to be dealloc'ed when you 'drain' the pool, that could start get slow. It's probably worth profiling how long the pool drains are taking.