About Magma performance

[Chris Muller]

There has been a lot of discussion about Magma performance recently,
and so I would like to try to address this question about performance.

The new 1.2 alpha just announced addresses two major performance
bottlenecks; the finalization process and the slowness of become:.
There are many improvements since 1.1; please use 1.2 releases for all
new development.  Note: 1.1 repositories require an upgrade to be read
with 1.2.

I don't know of any tool or framework for Squeak or Pharo that comes
close to offering the number and level of performance measuring and
tuning tools as Magma.

MagmaBenchmarker is the place to start.  It's available in the "Magma
Tools" package.  The numbers reported by the benchmarker are
best-case, so it's a good litmus test of whether to consider Magma for
the job.

There are also a bunch of statistics Magma captures while running.
Statistics are captured by each client-session, and the server tallies
its own statistics too.  I did this for Hilaire a couple of years ago
to improve Magma's performance over low-latency networks (ISDN); by
compressing the data sent over sockets.  This statistics-gathering
enhancement is designed so that Magma users can simply print the
report, paste it here on this list, and reveal a lot about how your
application uses Magma.

Of course, MessageTally spies are always very useful too.

All of these diagnostic tools are useful in determining which
performance tuning tools should be employed for improvement.

I would like to encourage use of these tools and, when all else fails,
post a question here.  If you can't include a change-set that
replicates a problem, then background information with a Message spy
will be helpful.

 - Chris