Rob, It looks like compiling with :small doesn't make much difference. The MACH sparc system is compiled/loaded with :small, but the SunOS system is not. Check out the size of the cores: -rw-r--r-- 1 wlott 23785472 Sep 23 16:56 sun4_mach/alpha/lib/lisp.core -rw-r--r-- 1 wlott 24649728 Sep 23 15:03 sun4c_41/alpha/lib/lisp.core -William