[Seaside] Re: Scaling Seaside apps (was: About SToR)

[Keith Hodges]

Jeremy

am I right in understanding that what you are saying is that squeak is 
simply not able to rip through strings as fast as perhaps a perl regex. 
Does this mean that there is some overhead in the handling or Strings in 
squeak that could use a look. I can imagine that ByteArrays may be more 
efficient if less useful than Strings.

Just a thought, but as you talk about all this work with strings and so 
forth I am wondering about object creation/deletion overhead.

One example for you. In a UI system that I once used, there were a lot 
of Rect objects flying about.  It turns out that in this case extreme 
performance improvements could be had be simply reusing one Rect 
instance and passing it into the routines that need it. Hundreds of 
calculations and operations can all be performed without filling any 
memory up with instances that are instantly thrown away and hang around 
for extensive garbage collection later.

so for example

drawSquare: size
| w |
w := Rect new
w width: size height: size.
 do things with a rect here...

becomes

drawSquare: size on: aRect
"note no new object allocation"
w width: size height: size.
do things with rect here.

I have used this tactic/pattern on several occasions many years ago, and 
I struggle to remember the details of specific instances, but I think 
one such instance was in an import routine. I was importing a data table 
of alarms that are raised by a piece of telecoms equipment. The input 
would have been a raw text file, the output 6000 or so populated objects 
with some munging in between. Simply reusing the same object as a buffer 
saved a lot of time.

best regards

Keith



		
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