Hi Scott,

> I just checked to see if my new method cache from about a year&half
> ago went in. It looks not. If I remember right it was a 5-15% gain on
> microbenchmarks at the time. You might want to reincarnate it.

We discussed these changes but nobody (including me) was able to recreate
the improvement you reported.

> I also
> had another change that was worth 5% by not having squeak read the
> clock 40,000 times a second. I think you had a proposed patch for
> this? Did that go in?

Oh, actually I forgot to finalize those changes. Thanks for reminding me!

> I don't remember all of the details, but if I remember right, when I
> combined both the core interpreter changes and some string
> enhancements, I found my interpreter was 30-50% faster than the stock
> one for macrobenchmarks.
> 
> As is before, the current method cache is ALWAYS, at most 2/3
> occupied.  It also pessimizes the branch prediction (What focussed my
> effort was finding out that a single instruction in the code accounted
> for a huge amount of the tuntime.

Huh? I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Where was that insn?
What did it do? How was it related to the mcache?

Cheers,
  - Andreas