I'm contemplating a project that would benefit greatly by a persistent memory image, though I'll eventually (in a year or so) need the 64-bit image, but: The image will be a lot larger than RAM. It would include a directed graph that had an index of a million or so entries, and most nodes wouldn't be indexed. So in order to even load it would need to use some sort of lazy access. And I'm not even sure that a Dictionary of over a million items is reasonable. (Naturally none of the examples address this problem.)
Additionally, all of my (written) documentation is so old that it doesn't even discuss multi-processor systems, so I don't know whether modern Smalltalks make any use of additional available processors.
I'd really like some advice, and possibly some references. I know that Smalltalk has the reputation for being slow (yes, I've been reading about the recent speed-ups), but much of what I'd need to write in any other language seems like it may already be present in Smalltalk, so if it would work, I'd like to choose it. But I won't be able to test this until the application has been running for quite awhile, so I would be very desirable that I know ahead of time.