gc-by-area and host uptimes

[Scott Cyphers <Cyphers%jasper.scrc.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Mon, 13 Feb 89 16:59 EST
    From: Qobi@ZERMATT.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jeffrey Mark Siskind)

	I dont recall the reason why you were so reluctant to cold-boot --- I
	guess it is much more than merely avoiding re-initing the state of the
	machine. It seems you are trying to drive the beast beyond its practical
	limits, and the existence of :Start GC :Immediately By-Area is your
	saviour. Asking for more is reasonable, but thats all you can do, for
	such an unusual need (which, dont you admit, is the case?)

    I am reluctant to cold-boot because it takes me over 24 hours to restore
    the machine to the state it was in prior to cold-boot. This is because of
    two reasons. First, I am running SPIRE and have lots of cached info like
    spectrograms and such stored in virtual memory. Second, my own Prolog
    compiler generates Lisp from Prolog with the property that it takes
    several hours for the Symbolics lisp compiler to compile the code
    generated. (It is not that my code is so outrageous, it is just that
    the symbolics compiler is tailored to hand-written functions which tend
    to be small. Anybody who has tried to use the symbolics compiler on
    machine generated code has found that the compiler blows up on functions
    that are longer than a few pages in length --- even if such code is
    very straighforward and Pascal-like. I don't think that it is unreasonable
    to use Lisp as a target language for another compiler and expect that the
    Lisp compiler can handle large machine-generated functions.) Anyway, so
    for my use, a mark-sweep-gc would be much faster and convenient than
    reboot, since I also must hand-hold my machine during reboot to restore
    the desired state of my machine.

And have you reported these compiler bugs?