[not about] gc-by-area and host uptimes

["William D. Gooch" <ai.gooch@MCC.COM>]

         There are many parts of our software that are less efficient than we'd
	 like, but there are only so many man-hours available to improve things
	 and hundreds of times more work than we can possibly ever get to.

	 One such program is the loader; we try to optimize the things with
	 the highest payoff, and the loader hasn't seemed to fit in this
	 category.  Is it really more important for you that Symbolics work on
	 making loading fast, as opposed to say, function calling, message sending,
	 garbage collection?

Not "as opposed to" but "in addition to."  Although I completely agree
with almost all of what you have said, I must point out that file I/O is
one of the slowest parts of the Symbolics system, and this is presently
a significant performance problem for my group.  We load up a big set of
large binary-format knowledge base files, and it takes long enough to
make most of us very reluctant to reboot unless we're forced to.  Thanks
mainly to the reliability of the Symbolics hardware and software, we are
rarely forced to do so unexpectedly except due to our own foibles.