At 10:13 PM +1000 4/28/98, Sunghun Seo (Sonny) wrote:

For few weeks, I looked around Squeak very serioulsy. And I am very satisfed with its basic theory.

But, when I face the overall performance, especially speed, it is hard to say that it is worth enough.

Therefore, I am trying to find the reasons.

Maybe, have Squeak inherited from the notoriously slow Smalltalk 80? or is it already the best condition to perform on various platform?

Could you please give me some advice that what makes Squeak so slow?

PS. I am running Squeak on Intel platform.

Squeak is quite a bit slower than the state-of-the-art in Smalltalk commercial interpreters. (Commerical Smalltalk's are *much* faster than most of the Java VM's produced to date).

At the moment, Squeak's strength is portability, not speed. Some folks are working on making it faster, however, and there is no reason it could not be as fast as the fastest Java JIT some day.

What specific Intel processor do you have? Does it have a level 2 cache? Squeak runs quite nimbly on a P133 with 256K of L2 cache. It is known to be noticably slower on machines without an L2 cache. It runs quite slowly on old 68020/68030 Macs due their lack of any sort of caches.

-- John