"Gerard Korsten" <gerard at shadowrain.co.za> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm currently running the VM: Squeak3.6 of '6 October 2003' [latest  
> update: #5429],
> , with any of the images  (3.6, 3.7 and 3.8) and I'm having some issues
> with High Utilization on a Gentoo Linux box
I've no idea what 'High Utilization' might be but the basic problem you face
here is polling. MVC controllers whizz round in a tight loop looking for
something to do. Thus the VM code to check for any new events gets exercised
very, very frequently. On my 600MHz RISC OS box it can get up to 50,000 polls
per second without some sort of throttling code in place. A 3.6 vm is
relatively old so you might find a more recent one has some sort of throttling
on the event checking. Or not.

A secondary issue is that Squeak _always_ has something to do even when there
are no new events from the OS. Background processes, animation (usually in
morphic anyway), timer signal checking, reporting your web browsing activity to
the FBI, all that stuff. We do actually have a relinquish processor prim
available that I think is called in the default background process but the
details of the implementation are completely platform dependent. 

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Gets parity errors under load.