Folks,

I've been running Tim Rowledge's NCM VM and image (see
<http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim>) on win32 successfully for a while now.
I'd like to offer a short performance report, because I think (and feel)
that I get appreciable results.

The two machines I have infected with Squeak are: A Toshiba Satellite 2520
(K6-2 at 300 MHz, 64 MB, Win98) and a Dell XPS system (P-II at 300 MHz, 128
MB, NT4SP4). The results have not failed to impress me:

<Tosh/Win98>     benchFib          benchmark
[approx.]       [sends/s]      [bytecodes/s]
--------------------------------------------
Squeak 2.3b       595,000         10,245,000
NCMVM 2.3         734,453         10,869,000
Jitter 2.3b       994,000         16,233,000

<Dell/NT4SP4>    benchFib          benchmark
[approx.]       [sends/s]      [bytecodes/s]
--------------------------------------------
Squeak 2.3b       654,000         11,111,000
NCMVM 2.3         768,757         12,165,000
Jitter 2.3b       913,000         16,666,000

Please note that NCM ("new compiled method format") does not try to improve
upon Jitter, it is an improvement upon the non-Jitter base VM/image (yet).
I included the Jitter figures for relative comparison. As I said, I'm
impressed.

I have measured neither memory consumption nor J2 performance, though I'd
be very curious if others have. At these significant rates, I wonder what a
J2-NCM VM could do...

All in all, I'd vote for merging Tim's improvements into mainline Squeak
(2.5?). Not only does NCM enhance the malleability of the VM, it's faster
too. How much more could we probably want?

Regards,
Helge
-- 
     Helge Horch, Helge.Horch at munich.netsurf.de, heho at gmx.de
           http://home.munich.netsurf.de/Helge.Horch
O- "Minister of Investment in Expensive Electronic Equipment (IEEE)"
       31ec 162e 4088 a228 6c6e  84bd 7ef0 026f 25f2 e590