Fixnums?

[srt@aerospace.aero.org]

[  ... I'm running AKCL 1.478 on a Sun 4/110.  ]

I'm a new user of this list.  I've read over some of the archive and
haven't seen these questions.  If I'm rehashing an old dead subject, I
apologize.

I'm having some troubles with the performance of AKCL on my Sun, and
they seem to be related to poor handling of fixnums.  For example,

	(dotimes (i 5000))

will cause garbage collection for FIXNUM pages.  I may be displaying
my ignorance of lisp internals here, but it isn't clear to me what's
using up all that fixnum space.  Can anyone explain?

Second, I snarfed the mailing list archives and read some of the more
recent traffic.  In particular, I read Bob Boyer's note on the use of 
declarations to improve fixnum performance.  But where he shows a very
dramatic improvement in performance, I get a very mild improvement:

	fib-slow(29) 	70.5 secs
	fib-fast(29)	63.7 secs

Again, can anyone explain?

					-- Scott Turner