Hi Everyone,

So with a lot of help from Frank Shearar and Nicolas Cellier, I have
introduced performance benchmarking to the SqueakCI server.  You can
see our current performance trends at the following link:
http://build.squeak.org/job/SqueakTrunk/performance/

I grabbed the shootout code from Nicolas Cellier, and tried to pick
input values that would allow the tests to run in 5-10 seconds, enough
to allow room for significant improvements without making the build
take forever.  I would like to encourage anyone who is interested to
take a look at the benchmarks.st script that is part of the SqueakCI
setup and send me advice if you have it.  I haven't done much
benchmarking so I am sure there are many places I could improve what
is done.  In the future I would also like to maybe add python or ruby
benchmarks to the server, so that we can compare Squeak's performance
vs other current languages.

I would also like to encourage anyone who is interested to grab
Nicolas' code and try to speed up Squeak itself, either on the image
or the VM side.  Now you can see the results of your work right away!

So, that is where things stand right now.  This is just the first
step.  Much as Frank has greatly expanded the CI server, I hope to
eventually add in benchmarks looking at graphical performance in
squeak (Balloon vs Gezira vs Cairo, etc), maybe network performance,
etc, etc.  If anyone has any ideas or suggestions I would love to hear
them.

Thank you all for your time, and for any feedback you can provide.
Jeff