I noticed some absurd preference checking in standard images a while back, but turning this off made no noticeable different in optimized Cog. Look for uses of Preferences subPixelRenderFonts, e.g. installStrikeFont:foregroundColor:backgroundColor:. There's a non-local return in the default path on preference access. So not having subPixelRenderFonts a defined preference method creates lots on noise when doing VM debugging.
in Pharo Preferences are not anymore... #subPixelRenderFonts is send to StrikeFont and just returns true (the default of the Preference). I think the idea was to add a Setting later if someone requests it... and nobody ever did.
So maybe we can simplify that method a bit.
http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=5517 -- Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de