>At 2:18 PM +0100 12/4/00, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:
>>"Andrew C. Greenberg" wrote:
>>
>>>  Sorry, my retraction of the bug report appears premature.  It repeats
>>>  with regularity now on my iMac, with current changesets and the B5
>>>  MacOS VM.  The problem, as mentioned, is that events, after a bunch
>>>  have backed up, tend to fire off at the rate of about 1 per second,
>>>  which can only be heightened by, for example, pressing the shift key,
>>>  or the like.
>>
>>Andrew,
>>could it be that you're using a PowerBook? Squeak does not interact with
>>the Power Manager, so the processor slows down when it thinks that you
>>don't do anything. I've also noticed this with every version of Squeak but
>>did not have the time to look into the matter.
>>Having some strategy for dealing with power management would certainly be
>>great especially for the PDA Squeak ports...

This was a problem with older powerbooks, say a 3400. I've not 
noticed anything unusual with the new G3 based powerbooks, I think 
they insert clock cycles, but I've not been able to benchmark any 
performance issues. To see this issue on a 3400 run the bouncing 
atoms morphic. The 3400 will freeze every x milliseconds as it 
sleeps...


Try the latest 2.9.6 VM There was some changes to the logic with 
regard to duplicate idle events, but I'm not sure this will clean up 
the problem. Bob did have his fingers in the event logic with a 
change to improve performance by stealing time from background 
applications, but I think that feature isn't turned on by default?

If you are displaying diagnostic information it would be useful to 
display the millisecond clock when the primitive to get the next 
event is called, just so you can see how often you are actually 
looking.


>
>I was, in fact, testing with one of the new Firewire iBooks.
>
>It is interesting that the "slow event" firings can be sped up 
>simply by pressing the shift key a few times, and slows back down 
>when you stop.  There are no serious delays in real time, however, 
>almost as soon as you stop typing, the delay kicks in.

-- 
--
===========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
===========================================================================
Custom Macintosh programming & various Smalltalk dialects
PGP Key: DSS/Diff/46FC3BE6
Fingerprint=B22F 7D67 92B7 5D52 72D7  E94A EE69 2D21 46FC 3BE6
===========================================================================