Stephen,

> On Friday night I executed "Smalltalk macroBenchmarks" on a 3.2 stock
> image and left it to run.  Saturday morning I see the dredded Win2k blue
> screen of death.  I reboot to find that my HDD is choking and sputtering
> to a slow death.

Macrobenchmarks are broken on Windows (and other systems that do dynamic
memory management). They try to "standardTime:" the result by eating up all
available memory except a little bit. If the available virtual memory is 512MB
that means allocating some 500MB of empty space.

> Anyone else have this problem with macroBenchmarks?  It seems that it
> really crunches the hard drive in whatever it's doing.  Why?

Swapping like mad unless you've got >512MB memory.

> I vote to pop up a big bold warning message when
> someone attempts to run macroBenchmarks.

I vote to dump "standardTime:" since it gives all but standard conditions.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

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