[Seaside] Squeak performance

[tim Rowledge]

On 2-Sep-06, at 8:45 PM, Grant Rettke wrote:

> What is the order of importance for making Squeak run quickly
> when considering: ram, hard drive speed, and cpu speed?
In my experience, the three things you need most for good Smalltalk  
performance are, in order
memory bandwidth,
memory bandwidth,
and memory bandwidth.
Cpu speed is surprisingly close to irrelevant except inasmuch as it  
can fill your memory bandwidth. Most of what Smalltalk does is follow  
pointer chains and copy bits around. Doing that fast needs memory  
bandwidth from the cache to cpu, from cache to main memory and main  
memory to display. A bigger cache substitutes somewhat for more  
bandwidth, so long as the cache fill/flush algorithm doesn't bite  
you. A faster cpu can in some cases obviate the need for some of the  
moving bits around and so substitute for some more bandwidth.

My belief is that a 1GHz cpu with a 1GHZ really-truly random access  
speed memory would run rings around current x86/ppc/sparc systems.  
It's a fairly safe bet, since the odds of actual 1GHz memory  asre  
currently slim.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Oxymorons: Military Intelligence