How do developers write applications that use next to no cpu? For example frozen bubble / kdevelop ... or any decent app.

My application waits for keyboard events in a while loop. But the cpu usage of the application jumps to 90% as a result!

This is an SDL application, but I also wrote a simple program and got the same problem..
The cpu usage is also in the 90 percentile here. How do developers write applications that use next to no cpu?

There are two basic ways that you can do this.
The first (and easiest) is to call usleep(us); from within the loop, with us set to a time in microseconds. This will sleep for us microseconds, during which time the CPU isn't used.

The problem with this is that you still have to poll much faster than you need to, which is inefficient. A better way is to set up a timer to interrupt your process every time it needs to do something, or an input event occurs, and have your process call the kernel-level function schedule(); instead (effectively sleep for a while unless interrupted). Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that outside of the kernel.

I suggest you could examine the source of Frozen Bubble to see how they do it.

If you're waiting for input, from the user or the network, you typically use poll() or select(). The gtk event loop sits in poll() most of the time, waiting for events from X, which arrive over a socket. Qt probably does something similar.

If you're writing a gui app, of course you'll just use one of these toolkits and not deal with poll() or select() directly. Even if you aren't writing a gui, glib (used by gtk) can abstract the event loop for you.

i use java, thread programming could achieve the same goal.
i think c should work similiarly
!st create some thread using pthread lib, then ask them to wait in pool, once it is triggered(stdin), it will continue the loop.

As far as I could tell, java doesn't give you a proper way to do networked gui apps as a single thread, which IMO is really icky. Particularly since threading isn't built into the C language like it is in java, I think things come out cleaner if you stay away from threads where select() does the same job. Programming in one thread means you don't need to worry about deadlocks and races, and what lock goes with what data structure and so on.

It's a lot easier to debug a program when it only does one thing at once!

I always just sleep for 5 or more miliseconds. My apps always use 1% or 0% cpu, and are REALLY fast. So what the heck!

while(1) !!!!

infinite loops aren't very efficient. O.o