As another datapoint on OS X and Aqua resource usage, I noticed that having Zoe running consistently kept load average around 1 or slightly above. Now that I have shutdown my login session, it won’t run at all. I get these errors:
kCGErrorIllegalArgument : initCGDisplayState: cannot map display interlocks.
kCGErrorIllegalArgument : CGSNewConnection cannot get connection port
kCGErrorIllegalArgument : CGSNewConnection cannot get connection port
kCGErrorInvalidConnection : CGSGetEventPort: Invalid connection
I don’t know why I have connection failures. I didn’t think you could display an Aqua session over a network connection (like you can with X).
Google found this tantalizing clue:
This is what you typically get when you try to start a quartz gui
application while logged in via ssh. So your configure script starts a
gui application which it certainly is not supposed to do.
So Zoe is evidently calling on some elements of the Quartz UI and failing. This removes a potentially useful application for Zoe: I could envision Zoe running on a group mailserver, allowing a group of users to view their mail in Zoe instead of in the old linear clients. It seems silly to think you need to run the Quartz stuff on a potentially headless system, especially if it chews up 25% of your CPU.
Update: I discovered it was Classic, not Aqua, that was churning away. So leaving an Aqua session logged in, annoying and non-secure as that as that may be, won’t be a resource drain.