Larry,

I haven't seen problems specific to startup, but I did have a problem
with an app that would freeze at random time intervals after starting a
couple of background processes.  This was in my "let's see if Squeak is
suitable for real work" phase, so having it lock up beyond help was a
danger signal.  However, I noticed that it was Morphic, not the VM, that
was frozen: the main window was able to repaint (its morphic content
simply never changed) and the main/system menu commands were useable.

A little tweaking turned the dump call stack command into a dump-all
command (it was shameless, but it worked), and I was ultimately able to
spot a deadlock that shouldn't have been happening.  IIRC, it was more
that what wasn't causing the deadlock became clear; widening a
particular critical section made the problem "impossible" to reproduce.

I can't promise you that the same hack would locate your problem, but
it I think it would be a useful addition to the mainstream VM.   When I
last looked, the pieces were nearly all present, but not connected by
default.  I made a very small change to the dump code to remove some
extraneous blank lines from the output.  Hopefully I sound very grateful
that the features were nearly all present, and a little disappointed
that there wasn't a clear way to get the changes harvested for use by
others.

Bill


Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bills at anest4.anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029