Re: silent PC vs. emacs

[YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu]

>>>>> On Sat, 02 Sep 2006 14:19:09 -0700, Dan Nicolaescu <address@hidden> said:

>>>>  . The blink-cursor mode uses a timer (that probably explains setitmer
>>>>    and SIGALRM)
>>>> 
>>>>  . select calls are issued when Emacs enters the idle loop
>>>> 
>>>>  . The rest might be because the blink-cursor mode causes signals,
>>>>    which then require various system calls, like select, to be
>>>>    restarted
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The same thing happens when blink-cursor-mode is turned off. It is a
>>> bit less frequent, but still a few times a second.
>>
>> You mean, you still have setitimer and SIGALRMs, even without
>> blink-cursor-mode?

> Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

SIGALRM has nothing to do with blink-cursor-mode (the timer mechanism
in Emacs, in general).  I think you were observing the following
asynchronous timer that is set in x_initialize (xterm.c) when
USE_X_TOOLKIT is defined.

  /* Install an asynchronous timer that processes Xt timeout events
     every 0.1s.  This is necessary because some widget sets use
     timeouts internally, for example the LessTif menu bar, or the
     Xaw3d scroll bar.  When Xt timouts aren't processed, these
     widgets don't behave normally.  */
  {
    EMACS_TIME interval;
    EMACS_SET_SECS_USECS (interval, 0, 100000);
    start_atimer (ATIMER_CONTINUOUS, interval, x_process_timeouts, 0);
  }

                                     YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
                                address@hidden