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From: Welch%osu-20@OHIO-STATE.ARPA (Arun)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.xerox
Subject: Re: Programming in Common Lisp on an 1108-110
Message-ID: <8711232225.AA03611@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: Mon, 23-Nov-87 17:24:09 EST
Article-I.D.: tut.8711232225.AA03611
Posted: Mon Nov 23 17:24:09 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Nov-87 20:36:57 EST
References: <SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 34

>    Has anyone written any large common lisp programs in Lyric on the 1108?
>    We have found Lyric to be essentially unusable because it is too slow
>    and there is not enough stack space to do interpreted execution of
>    sizable programs for debugging.  We've stopped running background
>    processes because we need the stack space.

(We never did get the original of this posting, so I'm copying off of
Christopher's.  Yes, our connection to the outside world is still off
the deep end.  Supposedly the PSN gets connected to the ARPANet in Jan.).

We recently finished re-implementing one of our systems from
Loops/Interlisp to PCL/CommonLisp, and didn't really run into any
major problems with stack space, even though most of the system didn't
get compiled till the end. The system and one run of the test case
increased Vmem by ~15-20% on a 32Mb partition, which probably
qualifies as large. 

In the early days of Beta-testing Lyric, however, we did try to run it
on a 1.5 MB machine, and it was pretty much unusable for real work, it
spent all day long swapping.  It was so slow, in fact, that it
couldn't deal with the network, since all the connections would time
out waiting for it to process... We haven't tried it on a machine that
small since then.

In some cases of the IdleFns, I've noticed that my Dove is faster
than some of the dandelions we've got here, but slower than the
-tigers.  On the other hand, my officemates Dove is slower than the
dandelions for those same Idlefns.  I'm running version 127 of the
microcode, and she's running 130, but I haven't really had time to see
if that's the problem or not.


...arun
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