Mysterious Processor Use - Again

[Richard Gaskin]

Fred moyer wrote:
> I saw a post to the list from back in April, 2006 about this. I'm  
> seeing it now with Rev. 2.8. For no apparent reason, the fan on my  
> Powerbook will turn on. I open Activity Monitor and see that  
> Revolution is hogging the CPU with 40 - 70% of the CPU. I have no  
> pendingmessages, no throbbing default buttons, no players.
> 
> Whenever this happens I start closing stacks. Inevitably, it is when  
> I shut a palette that the Activity Monitor goes down to normal. Just  
> now it was after I closed the "Message Box" that the racing stopped.  
> Does anyone know about this? Is it a bug? Is there some handler  
> desperately trying to keep a palette frontmost that is causing the  
> problem? I don't have a recipe -- it is intermittent.

Seems like you found the cause:  global variables can be updated at any 
time by any script, so the Variable Watcher posts messages to itself to 
update periodically so it can show current values.

70% sounds a bit high, and may warrant an enhancement request.  I don't 
know the frequency of updates, but my hunch is that they could probably 
do the update less often and no one would notice but it would free up 
some clock cycles.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
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