The operating system has a subsystem called “messages” to tell applications about things such as mouse clicks. Every time you click on the application, the OS drops a message* in the app’s queue. When the app is ready it reads the messages off the queue and decides what to do.
Windows can’t really tell what your application is doing, but it can see whether or not the app is reading the messages or just letting them pile up. So if no messages are pulled for 5 seconds, Windows throws up the “not responding” screen. The rest of the 316 clicks are just stuffing the message mailbox to the brim.
Linux is mostly very similar, except the UI stuff is not a part of the core OS, and there are several different systems.
On Windows a mouse click is actually two messages: “button pressed” followed by “button released”.
The way this works on Windows is as follows:
The operating system has a subsystem called “messages” to tell applications about things such as mouse clicks. Every time you click on the application, the OS drops a message* in the app’s queue. When the app is ready it reads the messages off the queue and decides what to do.
Windows can’t really tell what your application is doing, but it can see whether or not the app is reading the messages or just letting them pile up. So if no messages are pulled for 5 seconds, Windows throws up the “not responding” screen. The rest of the 316 clicks are just stuffing the message mailbox to the brim.
Linux is mostly very similar, except the UI stuff is not a part of the core OS, and there are several different systems.