(fwiw, this problem exists in Arduino as well. fixing one fixes both)

The rxtx lib distributed with OSX has some sort of debugging #ifdef set.
As a result, all print()/println() data is sysloged at a very high level.
Using any sort of print debugging can cause syslog to be overwhelmed with
messages and system performace to degrade along with Processing appearing
to lock up while it waits for the syslog() queue to drain.

The fix for this is simple -- rebuild rxtx without the debugging option.
However, I've been unable to find the exact sources used to build
Processing/Arduino. Should we move to the current rxtx release, or can
we get the original sources rebuilt without debugging options?

thx,

--jet

If I'm not mistaken (it's been a while since I rebuilt it) we're using the
last actual release, RXTX 2.1-7r2. If you or the Arduino folks want to fix
it, that would be helpful contribution.

my deck is clear the rest of the day, will give it a shot.

Great, thanks.

Now I remember what happened when I looked into this before, 2.1-7r2
doesn't appear to build under any recent release of OSX. It's from the
"Project Builder" days, and no way in hell I'm trying to run 10.1 on my Al
MacBook.

From looking at the rxtx site, it seems updating to rxtx2.2-pre2 is the
least-work option for OSX. I'll build that and see how Processing/Arduino
like it for OSX.

update: it might not be RXTX, it might system.out and system.err are
handled on OSX by EditorConsole. If I use Eclipse as my dev environment
this problem goes away.