2.0 Morphic too slow on 68K Mac

Maloney johnm at wdi.disney.com
Fri May 29 17:20:54 UTC 1998


>I haven't seen it reported, so I will. Morphic is still to
>slow to be useable on my Centris 610 20mhz 6840RC40. I am
>still limping along trying to learn how to use the old fashioned
>MVC.

Yep, we know. That's partly why we left MVC in. The scrolling lists
in Morphic (out of which most of the tools are made) still need
some tuning, but it even when that is done, Morphic may still seem
sluggish on 68K Macs. There are two reasons for this: (a) Morphic
provides smoother screen updates than MVC via double-buffering, and
(b) Morphic shows you the full object rather than just an outline
as you resize or drag it. I wouldn't want to give up (a), but
it might be relatively easy to make (b) be an option that could
be turned off on slower machines.

And there's always hope that some super-Jitter VM will give
us the extra performance we need to run Morphic well on slower
machines. :->


>I am looking forward to trying the new pluggable MVC. The differences
>between dialects is still frustrating. The debugger is my friend, and
>I am slowly learning new tricks.

Which dialects do you mean? Squeak 2.0 versus Squeak 1.31 or Squeak
versus some other Smalltalk? Just curious.

Thanks for your performance report. Here's an interesting Morphic
benchmark you could try:

    1. make an empty Morphic world or project
    2. use "new morph" to make a "BouncingAtomsMorph" and
       a "FrameRateMorph"; delete all other morphs
    3. read off the frame rate and milliseconds/frame

On a Mac 8100/110, I get about 74-78 msecs/frame (12-13 frames/sec).
I tried this on a Powerbook G3 in a computer store and got
something like 50 frames/sec!

	-- John





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