On Jan 13, 2007, at 2:01 PM, Karl wrote:

> I think the layout stuff and event stuff made morphic slower (added  
> around Squeak version 3-3.5). This is acceptable on new hardware  
> but can cause old machines to be very slow. I think some tuning  
> could be performed to make newer morphic faster.
> Karl


As always I;ll point out the work that I did to make a VM alteration  
that allows you to write the message dispatch with 1 or more stack  
levels to
syslog when the VM is asked to execute a new method. This logic then  
captures *all* messages sent without interfering with the image running,
thus giving an exact picture of what is going on.

I'll note on the website/ftp there is a Vm that is setup to provide  
this information on the macintosh.

I'm sure someone could come up with a program to read the message  
trace and like the message send process provide a nice
trace log of what is going on. Of course if the existing tracing  
facility in smalltalk provides an accurate picture without altering the
behavior then doing this doesn't buy much.   However you are busy  
then dispatching a high priority task to peek at what is going on
and I wonder about the side effects. As someone noted earlier there  
was some interesting interation with the idle process and other
processes they had created causing squeak to hang without responding  
and yet using little CPU.

--
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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