I'm running Arduino 10 on OS X, and I have a timing loop running and printing serial messages. I noticed my macbook fan started to spin up and looked into activity monitor to discover syslogd chugging away at 100% cpu. Why? Because Arduino is logging every serial message to system.log, keeping syslogd very busy.
Why does the Arduino sw do this? Can this be disabled? Even after I stopped the hardware syslogd was busy for a while, since I had so many messages buffered up (over 15MB of log for a few minutes of running, it was a fast loop!)
I think this is a consequence of how Processing (which Arduino is based on) handles the console: if I remember correctly, it prints messages to standard out, then catches those and displays them in the console. I think Mac OS X puts anything printed to standard out from an Application into the system log.
Yeah, this is super-annoying. As long as you don't open the debug console it doesn't happen. But as soon as you want to view debug messages the fan starts screaming and the CPU is hogged - sort of like negative reinforcement for debugging. I wonder if there's a way to avoid this? :-/
I wonder if there's a way to avoid this? :-/