> A greater than, say, 1% base CPU load from an otherwise idle application would indicate that it's doing some busy waiting somewhere... in my Activity Monitor, I don't see too many processes doing that, so just using an ObjC framework doesn't seem to be the guilty part. �By the way, very old versions of VisualWorks used to be bad in that way, but not any more; so there is something that can be done about it.

if I'm correct there are some busy waiting process in the VM instead of an event based + semaphore architecture.
We already removed some of the polling behavior at the image level but there are probably more and there was a discussion in the
VM mailing list. Now I do not know the conclusion.

> A large virtual memory working set wouldn't help either for power efficiency, though with today's RAM sizes it's probably less important.