On Sun, 17 Oct 2021, gettimothy via Squeak-dev wrote:

> Eliot,
> 
> Thank you for the reply
> 
> 
> That sounds like fun. To be clear, I can set these VM parameters on the running image? Or do I need to build a VM with those parameters pre-set?
> 
> 
> 
> . Space is no problem :
>
>       bash-4.3$ df -h /bulkstorage/
> Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sdd1       3.6T   86G  3.4T   3% /bulkstorage
> 
> that is where the 73Gb xml file is.

The bad news is that you need more than 73GB RAM as well.
I presume even 256GB will not suffice in practice because objects probably 
use more memory than the xml text.

> 
> 
> Squeak 5.3 is very slow compared to the pharo8.
> 
> I have a pristine image of both running that SAX parse on the same file.
> 
> pharo :
>
>       ping: two million elements.  Time: 0:00:04:12.13878234600296
> 
> 
> 
> squeak5.3 (I upped the priority too):
>
>       fs roughly 100000 elements in 5 minutes 

#timeProfile is your friend.

> 
> 
> for some reason, pharo lets me run the thing and still interact with the system, while on squeak, the process has priority over my inputs.

It's because you use the wrong priority. Use #userBackgroundPriority 
instead of #lowIOPriority.


Levente