Allegro 4.1 on a Sparc 10

[john@linus.mitre.org]

Howdy -

I'm sending this as a bug-report as well as to the mailing list
because I'm hoping to get some information from both Franz and other
Allegro users.  My basic question is, why isn't my Allegro code very
much faster on a Sparc 10 than a Sparc 2?

I'm running Allegro CL 4.1 [SPARC; R1].  The first thing to say is
that a standard Allegro image cannot run on both a 10 and a non-10
(something to do with the stack location).  So we installed the
relevant patches, and now have an image that can run on both.  To my
vast disappointment, however, my system (a natural language
understander) runs only marginally faster on the 10 (approximately 1.4
times faster).

Now, if I remember right, a 10 is supposed to have approximately 2.5
to 3 times the cojones of a 2, measured in spec marks.  Some simple,
purely numeric test code that I wrote does indeed run at least 3 times
faster.  Even some simple, non-numeric test code (lots of consing,
calls to MEMBER, EQUAL, etc.) runs about twice as fast.

But my big, hairy, heavily CLOSified system just isn't that much
faster.  Just to make sure it wasn't the patched image, I compared the
unpatched and the patched Allegro (on a Sparc 2), and there was no
appreciable difference in performance.

So, do any other users have any experience with 10s yet?  Does Franz
have any intuitions about this situation?

I'd greatly appreciate any information.  I imagine the mailing list as
a whole would be interested as well.

John Burger
john@mitre.org