On 8 Jul 1998, Eric Marsden wrote: 
 
> Good news! Have you fixed the problem I have with Squeak eating up 99%
> of the CPU (at least on Linux/x86 and IRIX)? MacOS and Windoze users
> might not care much, but it's not very nice on multi-user systems. 
> 
> By strace()ing it seems the vm is looping with endless gettimeofday() 
> calls, and from the vm source it would seem that the ioMsecs is the
> culprit. Surely this can be avoided? 
 
I'm not positive about this, but I believe that Squeak's CPU hogging is a
result of it being based on a polling architecture, as opposed to being
event-driven.  In other words, Squeak regularly checks (polls) for
mouse/keyboard/other events, which chews up the CPU. (please correct me if
I'm wrong here) 
 
I know that VisualWorks switched from polling to an event-driven
architecture around the time of 2.5.2, and this helped the idle CPU usage
problem (although I also heard that switching to event-driven caused a lot
of bugs/problems). 
 
Anyway, I'm curious about whether there are any plans for an event-driven
version of Squeak, and how closely it's related to the CPU usage problem. 
 
- Doug Way
  dway at mat.net
  dway at transom.com
  http://www.transom.com