Flutterby™! : Java & Mac issues

I'm in the process of writing some simple scripts to pump a bunch of email into the Scarab bug tracking system. Wow, we're not sure what's up, but with a newly rebooted machine running MacOS/X it's taking three or four seconds to serve up a page, at the far end of acceptable. But run it for a while and the JVM starts opening more "Mach Ports" and the next thing you know the Java process is sucking down all of the CPU for ten or fifteen seconds to serve a simple query.

I'm not sure what's going down, but in the process of tracking this down I'm having yet another of those "the Mac looks nice, but it'd be cool if they'd jack up the interface and slide a real kernel in under it" moments. The Mach kernel has a bunch of really wonky flaws which prevent these machines from being nearly as responsive or stable as they could be.