Very slow performance on faster machine

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Thu Jun 28 03:18:30 UTC 2001


>Thanks, everybody. I will check into some of these suggestions when I get to
>the office, tomorrow.
>
>Off the top of my head, my office PC is quite a workhorse on everything
>except Squeak. I.e., on most stuff, it is quite fast.
>
>I did just get a new bank of memory installed about two months ago, and the
>stuff that was the reason I was doubling the memory (Oracle database
>administration apps written in Java) ran much faster after adding the new
>memory.
>
>There is plenty of free disk space on the machine, and plenty of swap space.
>
>I defrag the disk, regularly (at least monthly, sometimes more).
>
>And the Squeak installation is very recent. Everything seems to work,
>correctly, except for the sluggishness. Also, I just used the "1 factorial"
>as an example (a real one, though) - everything I try to do in Squeak is
>very slow.
>
>Being an Oracle DBA, I am a tuner, by nature. If my PC were generally that
>slow, I would have fixed it a long time ago.

I'd look at how much memory squeak has free to use. Invoke help menu, 
VM statistics and report back with the info. If you run squeak with 
very little free space then it tends to do a full GC, versus being 
able to do incremental GC work.

(2) based on the image foot print and the type of GC work it is doing 
are you runnning into a paging issue? Smalltalk memory typically 
isn't very localized and a full GC touches all pages so if you do 
have paging going on as part of your normal minute to minute activity 
then you might be doing dozens of page faults per second.
-- 
--
===========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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