Perhaps boosting priorities for time critical threads will help. I don't know about MacOS but for Win32 something like that helps:
thread = win32api.GetCurrentThread() win32process.SetThreadPriority(thread, win32process.THREAD_PRIORITY_TIME_CRITICAL) current_process = win32process.GetCurrentProcess() win32process.SetPriorityClass(current_process, win32process.REALTIME_PRIORITY_CLASS) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list