Squeak-dev November 2004

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164 participants
373 discussions

How do people manage their images and code
by Rob Lally 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

Hi, I am looking for advice about how to manage my squeak image and my squeak code. I suppose these are two different things requiring different strategies for the management of each. Here's what I've been doing so far: 1) With my image I've resorted to making a copy of the whole squeak directory - VM and everything before I update/download packages from the web repository. This seems kind of ... primitive but I can't think of an alternative. Are there better practices? 2) For code - I write the change sets out to file periodically and copy them away. Again primitive and unsatisfactory. Particularly since I have no way to tie them to the state of the image when I backed them up. I understand that there are various package and code managers such as Monticello available. What should I be using? What are the current Squeak best practices in this area? Thanks ( in advance ) for your help. Rob.

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PDA and Squeak
by Squeak Smalltalk 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

Hi, I want to have a PDA that I can have in my pocket and that runs Squeak. Which one shall I buy in Europe? Is someone crazy like me and runs squeak on a pda ? Best Regards W.

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TextMorph abandons 'Principle of Least Astonishment'
by Ken Dickey 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

Hi, I don't know if this is considered a bug. but.. (TextMorph new string: 'Text me!' fontName: 'ComicSansMS' size: 26) openInWorld. ..shows the proper font but has font size 11. Looks wacky to me... -KenD

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Re: MacOS X VM
by Frank Caggiano 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

> I'm running Squeak3.7-MacOS-Full on my OS X 10.3 box. Everyhing works > fine when I click on the appropriate icons. But I can't figure out out to > run it from a command line. The "executable" is an ".app"--which acts > like a directory when I am at a command line. So I can't find anyhting to > execute. Do I need a different vm? Have you tried Mac OSX's 'open' command? -- Frank Caggiano frank at crystal-objects dot com http://www.crystal-objects.com The best educaion for the best is the best education for all. Robert Maynard Hutchins

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Garbage Collection in Squeak
by John M McIntosh 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

As some of you know I from time to time do serious GC tuning in VisualWorks. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/papers/GCPaper/GCTalk%202001.htm For years now (yes years) I've been thinking about doing serious tuning in Squeak, but yet things just weren't interesting enough. However with the release of Croquet, thoughts on TK4, and mumblings from folks I turned my eye upon what the Squeak GC was doing. First thanks to Ted Kaehler (among others) for writing this GC 10 odd years back which we've run with little change over the years until we added the ability to shrink/grow the memory space a few years back. First I'll need some help from macintosh users that have interesting images and can run a pending 3.8.4 mac VM with instrumentation and then send me some diagnostic log. People who are willing to help should email me directly, and I'll get you a VM and changeset, and we'll see if we can fill up my gmail account with log data. I'm very interested in getting Croquet data, having a test case you can run before/after would be best. So lets review how does the Squeak GC work: A simplistic view is that your image (25MB) is loaded into Old Space, and 4MB (set in Smalltalk) is allocated for Young Space. After allocating 4000 (if they fit) new object (limit set in smalltalk) we do an mark/sweep/compacting GC on young space using the VM roots plus roots identified from Old Space to Young Space references. Normally this means looking only at a few thousand objects, then occasionally we might do a full GC across all 300K object based on various conditions, but that's rare. I'll note the Old Space to Young Space remember table, remembers the Object containing the reference, not the reference so that if you have 100,000 element collection we interate over all 100,000 entries looking for the 1 or more old to young references, a cause for performance concern. If after completing the mark/sweep/compaction and over 2000 objects (set in Smalltalk) are survivors we "Tenure" them to old space by moving the old/young pointer boundary, then start allocating objects again, mind if the young space exceeds now 8MB free (set in smalltalk) we given memory back and reset things back to the 4MB boundary. Now object allocation can end early because we are allocating a big object, in that case we do an young GC, followed by a full GC (very expensive) followed by growing young space so the big object can fit. Also of course if we run out of root table remember space, we end the allocation process early and think about Tenuring things. Or it can end if we drop below a minimum amount of memory (200K set by smalltalk) which makes the image grow, which if it fails signals the low space semaphore (and brings up a low space dialog which no-one really see and have bitterly complained about) Yes I now know why that occurs too... The Problem: Last weekend I built a new VM which has instrumentation to describe exactly what the GC is doing, also to trigger a semaphore when an GC finishes, and to allow you to poke at more interesting things that control GC activity. What I found was an issue which we hadn't realized is there, well I'm sure people have seen it, but don't know why... What happens is that as we are tenuring objects we are decreasing the young space from 4MB to Zero. Now as indicated in the table below if conditions are right (a couple of cases in the macrobenchmarks) why as you see the number of objects we can allocate decreases to zero, and we actually don't tenure anymore once the survivors fall below 2000. The rate at which young space GC activity occurs goes from say 8 per second towards 1000 per second, mind on fast machines the young space ms accumulation count doesn't move much because the time taken to do this is under 1 millisecond, or 0, skewing those statistics and hiding the GC time. AllocationCount Survivors 4000 5400 3209 3459 2269 2790 1760 1574 1592 2299 1105 1662 427 2355 392 2374 123 1472 89 1478 79 2 78 2 76 2 76 2 Note how we allocate 76 objects, do a young space GC, then have two survivors, finally we reach the 200K minimum GC threshold and do a full GC followed by growing young space. However this process is very painful. Also it's why the low space dialog doesn't appear in a timely manner because we are attempting to approach the 200K limit and trying really hard by doing thousands of young space GCed to avoid going over that limit. If conditions are right, then we get close but not close enough... What will change in the future. a) A GC monitoring class (new) will look at mark/sweep/Root table counts and decide when to do a tenure operation if iterating over the root table objects takes too many iterations. A better solution would be to remember old objects and which slot has the young reference but that is harder to do. b) A VM change will consider that after a tenure if the young space is less than 4MB then growth will happen to make young space greater than 4MB plus a calculated slack. Then after we've tenured N MB we will do a full GC, versus doing a full GC on every grow operation, this will trigger a shrink if required. For example we'll tenure at 75% and be bias to grow to 16MB before doing full GC. c) To solve hitting the hard boundary when we can not allocate more space we need to rethink when the low semaphore is signaled and the rate of young space GC activity, signaling the semaphore earlier will allow a user to take action before things grind to a halt. I'm not quite sure how to do that yet. Some of this might be back-ported to earlier VM, I think so, yet I won't know until we gather more data and try a few things. -- ======================================================================== === John M. McIntosh <johnmci(a)smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659 Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com ======================================================================== ===

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[ENH] TestRunnerInForegroundPref-nk
by ned＠squeakland.org 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

from preamble: "Change Set: TestRunnerInForegroundPref-nk Date: 2 November 2004 Author: Ned Konz Adds a Preference called #runTestsInBackground for controlling whether the TestRunner should run tests in the background. "!

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Re: MacOS X VM
by Simon Bates 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

David Farber wrote: > > I'm running Squeak3.7-MacOS-Full on my OS X 10.3 box. Everyhing works > fine when I click on the appropriate icons. But I can't figure out out to run it > from a command line. The "executable" is an ".app"--which acts like a directory > when I am at a command line. So I can't find anyhting to execute. > Do I need a different vm? In Mac OS X applications are packaged as "application bundles" and are directories containing code and resources. To start an application from the command line you can use the 'open' command. See 'man open' for details. To start squeak by opening an image you could use a command like the following: open '/Applications/Squeak3.7-MacOS-Full/Squeak3.7-5989-full.image' this is equivalent to double clicking the image file in the Finder. To open the Squeak application directly use something like: open -a 'Squeak 3.7.5Beta1.app' Simon > > Thanks, > david

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Naive number questions
by Christophe Allegrini 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

Hello, This test speed is a part of a larger test to show a collaborative work between Squeak and Java through a new middleware. By associating Squeak and Java the result is surprising : 317 seconds ! Squeak source code : Time millisecondsToRun: [ | bv x | bv := BirdView new. "instance create" bv ipAddress: '127.0.0.1' ipPort: 2010. "connection" bv ltnName: 'ltn_postgresql'. x := 0. 1000 timesRepeat: [ bv rpcPackage: 'test' rpcClass: 'TestSpeed' rpcMethod: 'iteration' . "method iteration of java class TestSpeed call by Squeak" bv rpcEval. x := x + (bv evalResult at: 1 asInteger) . ] ] Java Source code : public String iteration() { long x = 0; String value = null; for (int i = 0; i < 100000000; i++) { x = x + 1; } value = new Long(x).toString(); return value; } The final goal is to create an opportunity for Squeak to access the domain of Business Application; by controlling Java if necessary ( access JDBC, RMI (RPC) ... ) Regards, Christophe Allegrini email : squeak(a)birdtechnology.net www.birdtechnology.net

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TestRunner in 3.8 -- ARGH!!!
by Torsten Bergmann 02 Nov '04

02 Nov '04

Hi, >In case this hasn't been clear to everyone, abstract test cases run all >of their "sub-tests" if executed. Squeak now behaves like all the other Unit implementations (in other Smalltalks and elsewhere). Abstract means there are no instances and therefore no test cases to run. So I would expect it to behave like it is now - not to show or run abstract classes. >In other words, in the 3.6 TestRunner >you can have a test structure >that looks like: [SNIP] >and with AllMyTests being an abstract superclass you only need to select >it and run all of my three tests at once. We should use abstract test superclasses to implement common behavior and not to run the tests together. If we have what you describe there is the danger that people change their systems design just to get the tests to run together. So it's mainly the problem of using the simple standard TestRunner UI. Personally I use the TestBrowser goodie which is really a nice way to run and implement tests. It was created by Kazuki Minamitani-san and I refactored it a little bit (the code is already integrated). See: http://map1.squeakfoundation.org/sm/package/6dfad36f-afd0-40ec-b4aa-cd59445… and http://kminami.fc2web.com/Squeak/Goodies/TestBrowser/index.html If you have used it for a while I'm sure you will like it and throw the simple TestRunner away. I use it in Sq3.6 up to Sq3.8 images and it's rock solid !!! It's nice since you can run tests by category, by class or run single test methods. Especially when you use Monticello and special class categories for tests this is a really helpfull and clearly arranged tool. I would vote for replacing the simple TestRunner with the TestBrowser in the standard image and provide the old TestRunner as an optional package. Later me want to convert it to use OmniBrowser as it's base architecture. Bye Torsten -- NEU +++ DSL Komplett von GMX +++ http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl GMX DSL-Netzanschluss + Tarif zum superg�nstigen Komplett-Preis!

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Fwd: Re: Vm Crashes
by tmorrow＠spymac.com 02 Nov '04

02 Nov '04

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