Hi people!

Just wanted to share some numbers - kinda interesting. I am running
Lunar Linux, kernel 2.6.7 all built locally. The CPU is a Pentium-M
(mobile) 1.5Ghz which is a spiced up PIII that actually matches a P4
with double the speed (!).

I use GCC 3.3.3 which doesn't yet support Pentium-M explicitly but after
searching around I found out that I should use PIII arch and NOT use
SSE2, since it is borken for Pentium-M in GCC older than 3.4, sigh...

Ok, I have now made a Lunar module for Squeak, so
rebuilding/reinstalling Squeak is just a simple "lin -c Squeak". Very
nice.

So I wanted to see how performance differs when I play with
optimization, first I built myself a sturdy baseline really boring and
slow VM (-O0, no optimizations at all):

'127617148 bytecodes/sec; 2644928 sends/sec'

Then I went bananas and flipped every switch ON, banzai! Well, had to
flip a few back off because it didn't want to compile (and SSE2 actually
seemed to slow things down) and I ended up at:

 '216765453 bytecodes/sec; 7000153 sends/sec'
 '219554030 bytecodes/sec; 6594158 sends/sec'
 '218243819 bytecodes/sec; 6694354 sends/sec'

Woah! That is one BIG difference! I had no idea these things mattered
*that* much!

Of course I have no idea if the resulting VM is stable or not - but it
seems to run fine. :)

regards, a Lunar-convert, Göran

DS. Darn it is fun playing with a source distro! Perhaps Gentoo is just
as much fun, but Lunar really shines IMHO. And I do have a nice working
Squeak module for it. :)