Squeak-dev April 2008

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

146 participants
187 discussions

RE: [squeak-dev] jitter (was: The Old Man)
by Sebastian Sastre 04 Apr '08

04 Apr '08

> > downside is that it would inherently be much more complex - the > > interpreter strikes a nice balance here. > > The first jitter had the advantage of being cross-platform, > but as I had > predicted it only improved performance by around 50% which is > less than > what we got by making the interpreter better. The second jitter (known > as Jitter3) was actually finished as far as I can tell. There > was still > some stuff to be done, but it was no worse in that regard than Unicode > or Traits support in current Squeak. There simply was not enough > interest for it to be adopted. > > And since it was finished, you can download it (get Squeak > 2.3) and run > some benchmarks (in Linux machines, at least). Here are the numbers on > this machine (3GHz Pentium 4): > > 2.3 image and normal 2.3 VM - 62,500,000 bytecodes/sec; 4,591,325 > sends/sec > 2.3 image and Jitter3 VM - 100,000,000 bytecodes/sec; 10,494,459 > sends/sec > 3.9 image and 3.7 VM - 160,602,258 bytecodes/sec; 7,292,693 sends/sec > > The Jitter3 numbers varied wildly, but even the more stable > numbers for > the normal 2.3 VM are very suspect. The problem is that the old image > didn't expect such a fast machine and doesn't seem to loop > enough times. > But the point is that the code is out there and we can > actually run it. > > -- Jecel > Hi Jecel, thanks for informing about the state of jitter. Those 3 million sends/sec more represents a nice pie of 30% better sends/sec. That jitter can make team work with current interpreter? An updated and ported jitter, for lets say 3dot10, you will say it sum performance near that 30% in sends? cheers, Sebastian Sastre

6 11

Re: [squeak-dev] Upgrading running servers?
by Andreas Raab 04 Apr '08

04 Apr '08

Avi Bryant wrote: > On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 12:00 PM, Stephen Pair <stephen(a)pairhome.net> wrote: >> If I understand what DabbleDB does, they essentially give each user their >> own squeak process to run in. When a session is first established, they >> start up a new image. Upgrading would be a matter of dropping a new image >> somewhere and as old sessions expire and new ones created, users are >> migrated over to the new code. With hydraVM, a scheme like that might be >> doable with just a small bit of session management in the main image. > > That's more or less right, yes. I've used variations on that strategy > before - in general, having multiple images going where old sessions > go to the old image but new sessions get routed to the new image makes > for very smooth upgrades. Yes, that's what we're doing too. When we need to upgrade a server we simply don't let any new sessions go onto it and once everyone is off the server is up for grabs. Unfortunately, some of the sessions last quite a while (sometimes for several days because our notion of "session" spans multiple users which need to overlap only for a short amount of time) which I guess is good business-wise and we're not running a lot of servers (which I guess is good too, since we scale) but it makes for some rather long delays which could be mitigated by a "hot" (or maybe just "warm") upgrade. Cheers, - Andreas

5 9

Squeaksource service down?
by Sebastian Sastre 04 Apr '08

04 Apr '08

Hi there, I think Squeaksource service is down Sebastian

4 3

FW: BlockClosure vs BlockContext
by Ted Bracht 04 Apr '08

04 Apr '08

Hi, I'm going through the Mentoring book by Andres Valloud and was trying to implement the ComplexConditions, which is basically a collection of blocks. To create one of those, the book suggests to implement #, in BlockClosure. To my surprise this didn't work, and I had to implement it in BlockContext instead. As the class comment for both classes is almost identical, I wondered if someone can explain what the difference is between them and which of those gets used when. Thanks in advance, Ted

2 3

[OT] Qwaq gets favorable mention in WSJ
by David T. Lewis 04 Apr '08

04 Apr '08

In today's Wall Street Journal, page B10 if you have the hard copy or here on the web: <http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120719726445485981-xd2vfr52WoJQWPksv…> Dave

2 1

Question about the Heap class.
by Brett Kosinski 04 Apr '08

04 Apr '08

This might just belong on the newbies list, but... I'm looking at using a Heap for a primarily read-only, sorted set of some objects. Now, just to prefix this, I'm assuming the Heap is largely equivalent to the SortedCollection, in that it's intended to keep it's items in sorted order as they're added, and that accessing those items using the #at: selector will retrieve them in their sorted positions. So, that said, I have the following little code snippet: h := Heap new sortBlock: [ : a : b | a <= b ]. "Just to be explicit" r := Random new. 1 to: 10 do: [ : i | h add: (r nextInt: 1000000) ]. h do: [ : i | Transcript show: i; cr ]. Here's some example output: 90436 692737 206478 849361 825757 704772 262508 999388 971421 956498 It ain't sorted. So... thoughts? :) Brett.

3 4

Box-Admins Team Report for March, 2008
by Ken Causey 03 Apr '08

03 Apr '08

The box-admins team is reponsible for seeing that the community shared server is maintained and setting up any new features to be hosted on that server. For March, 2008: Squeak version history data created by Andreas Raab can now be found in the official FTP site at http://ftp.squeak.org/history/ . Göran Krampe responded quickly to a report that SqueakMap was done and brought it back to life. Filesystem space on the community server has gotten a little tight and the problem is exacerbated by the local gsnapshot backups we keep. I decided to eliminate the "every 4 hours" backups that we kept for 24 hours to recover a few gigabytes. This is an issue we will need to address in the coming months but is not an immediate problem. I want to thank the community for the monetary support needed to fund the box and remind them that the bills continue to appear and that you can currently contribute to the hosting bills by going to http://www.squeak.org/Foundation/SupportSqueak/ and purchasing a Squeak badge. Note that a donation here may be used for other Squeak Foundation services including but not limited to development, development infrastructure, and promotion of Squeak. The services being hosted have continued to grow and include (but are not limited to): http://www.squeak.org/ SqueakMap - http://map.squeak.org/ http://ftp.squeak.org/ http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/ http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/ http://source.squeakfoundation.org/ http://map.squeak.org/ https://svn.squeak.org/ http://update.squeakfoundation.org/ http://wiki.squeak.org/ http://bugs.squeak.org/ and DNS services for squeak.org and squeakfoundation.org domain names. Ken

1 0

Upgrading running servers?
by Andreas Raab 03 Apr '08

03 Apr '08

Hi - [Apologies for the cross-post but there may be answers to this question coming from people who are subscribed to Seaside but not Squeak-dev] What are the best practices for upgrading portions of your running server? I'm not talking about replacing the main business logic of your server application but rather relatively small things like an improved log module, or an administrative report function etc. Basically parts that you can assume aren't used while you upgrade them. I was quite surprised that I wasn't able to find any recommendations on how to do that. And I can't imagine that this problem hasn't come up in Seaside or other Squeak or Smalltalk server deployments. So what do people do in such a situation? Fire up VNC and load the latest MC package? Is that feasible when you have hundreds of users pounding the server? Any other (semi- or fully-) automated variants? Alternative recommendations? Thanks for any insights you can share. Cheers, - Andreas

6 6

Physics Objects and Squeak 3.10
by Joe Apuzzo 03 Apr '08

03 Apr '08

I'm new to the list and have slowly been learning Squeak over the last few weeks. I want to develop lessons for kids starting in 3rd grade up to 5th grade ( thus using eToys as the main interface ) I recently came across Phun ( http://phun.cs.umu.se/wiki ) which is a really great Physics simulator. But it's a toy and lacks the rich environment that Squeak has for introducing, planning and accomplishing a "class project". I know that there is ODECo for Squeak ( http://languagegame.org:8888/ggame/15 ) but 1) It only runs at on 3.7 2) Only has a few objects to work with 3) Does not have settings for friction, density and bounce 4) Does not have the concept of liquid and gas Therefor is there any work on adding objects to eToys that have Physics attributes like those in Phun? If not, is anyone interested? Yours humbly; Gnu Joe Joseph Apuzzo www.mhvlug.org

1 0

Pier demo of squeak.org ready
by Lukas Renggli 03 Apr '08

03 Apr '08

I prepared a quick demo of the Squeak web site using Pier. My thanks go to Danie and Karl, that provided me with the old image to migrate the content. I did not adapt the CSS or the components of the page yet, what you see is as Pier comes after the installation. As I mentioned there are dozens of plugins ready that can be placed at any part of the web-site: http://squeak.lukas-renggli.ch The password for an admin users with (almost all privileges) is: demo/demo The design can be adapted when editing the "Environment" page. Some system settings are available in "System". Also try the HTML validator (note that some other pages fail to validate, but that's because of some invalid hand crafted HTML in the contents pages): http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsqueak.lukas-renggli.ch Cheers, Lukas -- Lukas Renggli http://www.lukas-renggli.ch

15 24

Jump to page: