On Wed, 25 May 2005 12:28:20 -0700, Tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

> "Gerard Korsten" <gerard at shadowrain.co.za> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm currently running the VM: Squeak3.6 of '6 October 2003' [latest
>> update: #5429],
>> , with any of the images  (3.6, 3.7 and 3.8) and I'm having some issues
>> with High Utilization on a Gentoo Linux box
> I've no idea what 'High Utilization' might be but the basic problem you  
> face
> here is polling. MVC controllers whizz round in a tight loop looking for
> something to do. Thus the VM code to check for any new events gets  
> exercised
> very, very frequently. On my 600MHz RISC OS box it can get up to 50,000  
> polls
> per second without some sort of throttling code in place. A 3.6 vm is
> relatively old so you might find a more recent one has some sort of  
> throttling
> on the event checking. Or not.
>
> A secondary issue is that Squeak _always_ has something to do even when  
> there
> are no new events from the OS. Background processes, animation (usually  
> in
> morphic anyway), timer signal checking, reporting your web browsing  
> activity to
> the FBI, all that stuff. We do actually have a relinquish processor prim
> available that I think is called in the default background process but  
> the
> details of the implementation are completely platform dependent.
>
> tim
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim at rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Useful random insult:- Gets parity errors under load.

Oh, sorry forgot to add this: High Utilization := 96%+ of cpu used  
continously.
I'll see what happens if I install VM 3.7b for linux(unix) - perhaps it  
will fix
the issue.

Thanks
Gerard.