lakin@csli.Stanford.EDU (Fred Lakin) (07/25/90)
I'm curious as to responses from users,vendors, proponents and lisp
others to this depressing note on sun-spots recently:
Date: 9 Jul 90 00:09:14 GMT
>From: gordoni@chook.ua.oz.au (Gordon Irlam)
Subject: Sun-4 MMU Performance
A Guide to Sun-4 Virtual Memory Performance
===========================================
Gordon Irlam, Adelaide University.
(gordoni@cs.ua.oz.au or gordoni@chook.ua.oz.au)
Throughput on a Sparcstation drops substantially once the amount of active
virtual memory exceeds 16M, and by the time it reaches 25M the machine can
be running up to 10 times slower than normal. This is the conclusion I
reach from running a simplistic test program on an otherwise idle
Sparcstation.
.....
Applications that have a large virtual address space and whose working set
is spread out in a sparse manner are problematic for the Sun-4 memory
management architecture, and the only alternatives may be to upgrade to a
more expensive model, or switch to a different make of computer. Large
numerical applications, certain LISP PROGRAMS, and large database
applications ARE THE MOST LIKELY CANDIDATES.
posting as one who bought a SS just for the purpose of
running lisp,
tnx, fcutting@parc.xerox.com (Doug Cutting) (07/25/90)
In article <14613@csli.Stanford.EDU> lakin@csli.Stanford.EDU writes:
I'm curious as to responses from users,vendors, proponents and lisp
others to this depressing note on sun-spots recently:
Date: 9 Jul 90 00:09:14 GMT
From: gordoni@chook.ua.oz.au (Gordon Irlam)
Subject: Sun-4 MMU Performance
Throughput on a Sparcstation drops substantially once the amount of active
virtual memory exceeds 16M, and by the time it reaches 25M the machine can
be running up to 10 times slower than normal. This is the conclusion I
reach from running a simplistic test program on an otherwise idle
Sparcstation.
We two have been bitten by this, but have been informed that Sun will
have a patch for this out quite soon (in a few weeks, according to our
unofficial source). For ~25Mb Lisp jobs I've experienced a slowdown
closer to 2x, but performance will vary with locality of reference.
Doug7thSon@SLCS.SLB.COM (Chris Garrigues) (07/28/90)
From: lakin@csli.Stanford.EDU
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 90 12:26 CDT
I'm curious as to responses from users,vendors, proponents and lisp
others to this depressing note on sun-spots recently:
Schlumberger's Austin Systems Center was one of the first groups to
identify this problem. Needless to say, they aren't very happy about
it since they own a large number of SPARCstations. The latest word is
that there is supposed to be a kernal patch which will fix the problem,
but this patch hasn't been received yet at this time.
I don't have the data in front of me, but I believe that the figures
indicated that the application under development was slower on a
SPARCstation than it had been on a Sun3.
I don't know much more since I'm somewhat of an outsider on this
particular issue, but I'm sure that someone from ASC will be willing to
comment more on the situation.
Chris Garrigues,
Schlumberger Laboratory for Computer Sciencevladimir@prosper (Vladimir G. Ivanovic) (07/30/90)
There was an official Sun comment on the problem in comp.sys.sun (sun-spots?) recently. -- Vladimir