Andreas,

A little profiling confirms your suspicion: it's full gc's.  It even 
(especially!!!<g>) explains a pause from something that does not 
create new objects.

There is good and bad in this for me.  The good new is that I don't 
need the affected application.  It's an old game concept that I 
revived as a test of Squeak.  The bad news is that this is a 
situation in which lack of performance equates to lack of 
functionality.  With the current perfomance hits, I doubt the game 
would be playable.  I realize that I could bypass Alice, but then I'd 
end up with my own buggy version of WonderlandActor.

I would not argue for removal of essential gc's from the class 
builder, but is there a way to refactor Alice so the classes would 
not be necessary, and therefore would not need to be recompiled?  
The only other thing that comes to mind would be to allow bundles 
of activity so that multiple changes could be followed by one full gc 
at the end of block.  But, I think it would be better to elminate the 
dependence on creating new classes, or to find another fix of the 
classbuilder that does not require the gc's.

Thanks!

Bill

Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
bills at anest4.anest.ufl.edu
(352) 846-1285