"Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:

> You won't ever see that latency. When we see an empty event queue we
> stimulate the input semaphore which will force ioProcess to run right away
> (since ioProcess is running at higher priority). IOW, whenever you query for
> an event we make sure that if there is one you get one. Trust me, this stuff
> works.
Ah, yes, I see the line in #nextEventFromQueue. That's good when an
interactive loop is running somewhere, it'll keep things ticking. I
hadn't noticed it before.

I've managed to improve things a lot for my machine by making the
primrelinquish signal the inputSemaphore if any events came in as a
result of the event polling in the prim (remember this is a CMT OS no
threads for the IO, no interrupts). I don't signal for events gleaned
via the primGetNextEvent since we already got to primGetNextEvent
at that stage. The problem for me is that if primRelinquish or
primGetNext Event are not called _very_ frequently then my machine and
all the applications on it is DEADDEAD. To have a decently working
machine I need wimp_poll() called hundreds or better yet thousands of
time a second. Maybe I should investigate having a vm ticker trigger it
even if the image doesn't.

> The short version is: Remove EVERYTHING that relates to buffering (incl.
> event queue, ioProcess etc) and just use the get next event prim verbatim.
> Period. Since all VMs use sufficient event buffers, there is zero reason to
> do it in the image. All of this was done when there were no VMs with event
> support and internal buffering and we had to cope with all of the variations
> from Squeak.
Maybe I'll try it sometime on the road to the Great White North whilst
stuck in a blizzard. Got to have something to occupy the mind in a
whiteout!

So far I've improved performance in MVC to very reasonable and morphic
to tolerable. Certainly a lot better than it was, which is good. 


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
You don't have to know how the computer works, just how to work the computer.