Hi,

thanks for the response.  I was using a plain Squeak image, out of the
box, from the FTP server.  I compiled the VM myself (Squeak-3.0).

After experimenting a bit, it seems that much of the CPU usage was due
to the SqueakLogo; it seems like it's a flash animation rather than just
a little morph and uses a lot more resources than one might think.
Removing it brought the CPU usage down to a few percent and doubled the
frame rate.  After getting rid of it, Squeak still has some delays in
most places, but it's a lot more responsive.

It might be a good idea to go for a good "out of box" experience
and either getting rid of SqueakLogo or replacing it with a more
efficient implementation.

Your message and this mailing list have a number of useful suggestions
(message tally, frame rate morph, etc.).  I wonder whether one couldn't
add them to the default image in another hypertext window similar
to "Getting Started...".  Or, maybe, one could even have a whole
hypertext-based help system come with the image, with active links 
that open utilities and do other things when clicked on.  Are there
any hypertext-based help systems for Squeak (yes, I know that 
Scamper+Swiki could be considered something like that)?

    If you run a name lookup, e.g., from the main UI process, then that
    process is blocked until the lookup completes or times out. For that
    reason, doing any serious amount of network stuff is often better done
    from a separate Squeak process.

That's good to hear.  It sounds like the low level hooks are in place,
it's just that some of the tools don't use it.

Cheers,
Thomas.