[squeak-dev] 64 bit images
Colin Putney
cputney at wiresong.ca
Tue Nov 17 02:33:05 UTC 2009
On 16-Nov-09, at 2:40 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> One was Quallaby. They did a network monitoring app that had huge
> numbers of large integers in a graph representing the state of the
> network.
I worked on that app for bit. We had one installation we had to be
careful with because the images were 3.5 GB, and if we got beyond
that, there wasn't enough room for the VM to work. Other customers
were smaller but headed upwards and we could see that we would hit the
limit eventually. At that point we were already processing much more
than 4GB of data at once, but the partitioning into separate images
was based on external factors and wasn't very flexible. Before I left,
I was part of a project to move to a more cloudy architecture where
partitioning was much more flexible.
I guess the take-away from that was that many cooperating smaller
images works as well or better than one huge image. There might be
applications where that's not true, and everything *has* to be in the
same address space, but I can't think of any.
That is not to say, however, that 64-bit images aren't needed, just
that images larger than 4 GB are the least interesting implication of
having 64-bit pointers. I'd rather use the pointer bandwidth for more/
better immediate values, and run in 64-bit mode for better use of the
hardware and integration with the host OS.
Colin
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