possible to make NonBlockingReader faster to poll?

[maxandersen]

I got code similar to this:

while (running) {
                terminal.draw(this::ui);

                // Non-blocking read with ~16ms timeout for ~60 FPS
                int c = backend.read(16);
                if (c == 'q' || c == 'Q' || c == 3) {
                    running = false;
                }
            }

using the NonBlockingReader and I was getting about 6 fps - which I initially thought was due to drawing taking time but with profiler I saw that the read operation - even with 1 ms timeout takes about 65% of the time in that loop.

I know I can explore doing this in a separate thread but feels like something must be going on making it taking that much time just checking

here is the profiler tree from jvisualvm:

this is on Mac in a ghostty terminal which for similar app in rust gets 30-34 fps, I can get 21 fps with quite sloppy java - as long as I don't check for input.

Is the only option really to go multithreaded?