<p></p>
<blockquote>
<p>The effect of this is that if the main Smalltalk thread runs continuously, for example is in some compute-intensive loop, then the heartbeat thread will be prevented from running, and hence events such as Delay expiry will not be checked for, and the main thread will never be interrupted.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I doubt any modern OS does cooperative scheduling at any priority level. Without the increased priority, the heartbeat will still be scheduled but it may not interrupt the main thread at the intended time.<br>
Also, today's machines are almost all multi-core, so even if you keep a core busy with the main thread, another core may schedule the heartbeat process.</p>

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