An account circulates of a program whose throughput rose while the user moved the mouse and fell when the mouse was still, attributed to the interrupt stream waking a loop that was otherwise idling. No claim is made here about which program, which operating system, or whether the proposed mechanism is the right one.
Editorial judgements on a 0 to 10 scale, argued in the notes below and nowhere else. They order a list. They are not evidence and they never appear in a claim.
Before concluding a loop is starved of work, check what wakes it, because a scheduler that only runs you on an interrupt makes an unrelated interrupt source part of your performance envelope.
Triage questions. There is more than one story of this shape, so the first job is to separate them rather than merge them into a composite that never happened. Candidates include a DOS era game, a Windows 95 install, and a modern idle-loop case; each needs its own lead if they are distinct. For each: the earliest first-hand account, the named software and version, and whether the interrupt explanation was measured or assumed. A composite story assembled from several real ones is the failure mode this repository exists to catch.