There must be a way to discern intended from buggy compromises in performance. One thing is when one app of dedicated use takes a lot of CPU to perform an action understood and desired by the user (render a 3D graph) and another is to have some widget scrolling in such a buggy way that the system becomes sluggish. And no matter what, Octave just paused in some inactive window should let the system work as usual, 5 minutes same as 5 days after booting the program.