Human vs. machine input (was: Re: Behaviour of setjmp/longjmp ...)

[Guy Harris]

>I don't deny that this is wasteful of network and cpu resources, and
>NeWS probably allows improvement by moving some of these operations
>into the server when the client doesn't need them.  However, X is an
>important fact of life these days.

The original complaint was about time wasted "watching" for transitions
such as that; X clients don't have to waste lots of time doing that,
they are presumably blocked on a "read" or "select" or "poll" or
something such as that waiting for an event from the server.  (A
subsequent posting indicated that the problem was with DOS processes
running under VP/ix; it may well be that, as far as the DOS process
knows, it owns the whole machine - after all, it's running under DOS,
right? - and thus sits in a loop polling the keyboard.)

Furthermore, how bad a problem *is* that sort of thing?