Eric Scharff <Eric.Scharff at Colorado.EDU> is widely believed to have written:

> The feeling that Squeak 3.0 feels sluggish (especially when compared to
> 2.8) seems to be verified by the benchmarks.
> [snip]
> Are these slowdowns permanent?  Is there something I can do to avoid this
> over 10% slowdown?
I see a similar slowdown on Acorn, and it seems to be almost entirely
the cost of hitting the event polling prim(s) every 20mSec; change to a
brain numbing 200mSec and get back most of the performance but loose all
control over the pointer....

It's just another aspect of the long running argument over pre-emptive
multitasking versus co-operative; response versus raw performance etc.
etc.

In the particular cases of Mac & Acorn I suspect the polling takes a
longtime precisely because it is a CMT call and many operations have to
be done to get all the events.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- Cursor's flashing but there's no response.