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Please fill me in....

    Date: Sat, 23 Dec 89 17:11:23 CST
    From: Arthur D. Flatau <flatau@CLI.COM>

       Date: Fri, 22 Dec 89 11:05 EST
       From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)

	   Date: Thu, 21 Dec 89 08:45 PST
	   From: Spock@SAMSON.CADR.DIALNET.SYMBOLICS.COM (Mr. Spock)

	   Maybe I'm mistaken about the general tone of this Symbolic vs.
	   "Conventional" machines in the area of price/performance/environment but
	   it sounds to me like some of these unix machines are now viable
	   alternatives to 36xx's.

      [...]

       No.  In order to run Lisp effectively, you need a decent amount of
       memory (16Mb, I guess) and a local paging disk.  This would bring the
       total cost of the workstation up to $15-20K.

						       barmar

    I have a Sun 3/60 with 20Mb of memory.  The main lisp program I run on
    it is the Boyer Moore theorem prover.  It has some (maybe lots) of
    declarations.  It runs faster on my Sun (under Austin Kyoto Common
    Lisp [AKCL]) then on the Symbolics.

What kind of Symbolics are you comparing to and how much disk/memory?

  I do not have a local paging
    disk.  However if you run AKCL (or Lucid for that matter) with a large
    enough Lisp image you lose big during garbage collection.  This is
    because of the large number of page faults generated.  Lucid seems to
    be a bit better about garbage collecting, but the same problem will
    arise at some point.

Ahh yes, page faults would be deadly for you which is probably why you
have(need?) 20mb of memory.  But I experienced the same slowdown in my
sun setup which had a local paging disk.  So you're saying that there is
a significant difference between the number of page faults on a Sun vs.
Symoblics during garbage collection?  Or are there more things involved
in GC (tag bits?) that create problems for "standard" architectures.?

 AKCL runs real fast, but the debugger is, to be
    charitable, primitive.  I don't know what a Sun 3/60 with 20Mb costs,
    but I would guess that it is under 20K.  Of course we also have a Sun
    3/280 with 32 Mb and several big fast disks for paging for each 5 or 6
    workstations.

    Art

Thanks for the info.