I just had a strange episode where I had about 5 webpages open (in dock and out of), none of them were doing anything (all were Done loading), and none had animated graphics that I could see (all were news stories on Yahoo finance). And yet, top reported Camino going at something like 60% of processor time, and in Camino itself, *even the UI* wouldn't respond rapidly - I mean the scroll bars wouldn't move when clicked on for a second or two. No Ball-o-Death, but just a second-long freeze.

(IMO, this in unacceptable in a modern OS, but that's at least half in how Cocoa is designed than anything else - I'm told that AppKit is *not* reentrant - why not just run ALL the UI stuff - menu pulldowns, menu hightlighting, scrollbars, etc, either as part of the WindowServer process itself, or as part of a separate task, which would get it's own time-slice in the scheduler? But if AppKit isn't reentrant, this can't be done (easily, at least)

Anyway, I opened up Mail to write this, and top in Terminal to look at usage percentages, and went back to Camino. Everything works as expected, other than that processor usage goes to 25-45% when I scroll a window which seems excessive (it's just blitting from a backing buffer when there are no animated graphics and such, right? Or is top an imperfect measure of what's actually going on?) But there aren't any "UI hangs".

Which makes me think a useful addition to Camino itself, or more likely, as a tool for Camino developers (or perhaps ALL developers) would be an app to let a developer take an *immidiate* snapshot of what was going on in a thread. Like Apple's SpinWatcher, only more stable and user-invokable (instead of being on a fixed timer) - there are lots of times when I've gotten the Ball-o-Death IN SpinWatcher. New meaning to chickens and henhouses (sort of, mixed metaphors, arrgh! :)

Any one else thing this is a good idea, and have a clue how to go about it?

IMO-also, Apple should as a matter of course make the source for all it's "minor" dev tools (SpinWatcher, Quartz Debug, ObjectAlloc, etc) and maybe even some of the major ones (xCode, IB) OSS.. It's not like there's valuble IP in there - it ONLY RUNS ON MACS UNDER COCOA - not much thread of MS stealing it. Compiler code is not an issue - most (if not all) is done by GCC already (I'm not sure about zero-link and predictive compilation though). Any OSS-advocates here with some legal/political experience who like to tilt windmills who's like to help me try to convince Apple of this?

Jim

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