Squeak 2.0 for Debian GNU/Linux

Markus Kohler markus_kohler at bbn.hp.com
Thu Jul 9 06:24:19 UTC 1998


Doug Way wrote:
> 
> 
> 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 have seen that too when I was profiling Squeak some time ago. 


> 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 guess you are right, but I'm wondering if calling this system function
so 
often is really necessary. 

> 
> 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.
> 

I would like to see that too. 


Markus



-- 
Markus Kohler  mailto:markus_kohler at hp.com





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