I am pleased to announce release 41 of the "Magma" object-oriented
database management system has been posted to SqueakMap.  Release 41
brings significant improvements in performance, scalability and
robustness, particularly on slow networks, as well as improved
transparency and operation.

Improved Performance and Scalability

	At the core of the better performance and scalability are
architectural improvements to the networking module, "Ma Client
Server", which now maintains up to 50 simultaneous socket connections
instead of just one, and now also compresses request/response
ByteArray's when appropriate.  The compression, alone, showed more
than 100% performance improvement on ADSL-speed network connections.
Thanks to ofset.org for funding this development.

Improved Operational Monitoring

	An all-new performance and system-health monitoring package called
"Ma Statistics" was developed and integrated into all layers of the
Magma architecture.  Performance statistics for the last half-hour
(hour, day, week, your choice) are captured in five-minute (also
adjustable) intervals.  Is the server taxed or loafing?  What was the
average response time for clients?  What was the longest response-time
for any single request for any client?  What was the average size of
each response?  These and dozens of other statistics are now captured
while the server runs, with no performance penalty.

Improved Distribution

	A MagmaForwardingProxy is a "bookmark" to an object in another
repository, further improving performance, scale, distribution and
database administration.  These have been present for some time, but
have been heavily tested and improved in this release.

Improved Transparency

	Transactions may now be as long as desired.  In fact, transactions
may even span image saves! You may start an image, connect to a Magma
repository, begin a transaction, make some changes, save and exit the
image (not yet having committed), reboot the image later (objects in
the image are brought up to date with changes by other sessions),
continue any further changes, and finally commit successfully.

Improved Operation

	With remote administration, release 41 better supports
headless-operation mode.  The server now also keeps track of its
memory consumption relative to capacity and will take action to reduce
memory utilization, as necessary, before it becomes a problem
(although Magma servers have always operated with a relatively low and
fixed memory footprint, albeit dependent on number of clients and
activity).