LISPM I/O performance hysteria

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Date: Wed, 24 Jan 90 11:07 PST
From: Robert D. Pfeiffer <RDP@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>
Subject: LISPM I/O performance hysteria
To: SLUG@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com
cc: Genera-8-0-Beta@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com
In-Reply-To: <19900123064834.5.RWK@HIGASHIYAMA.ILA.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM>
Message-ID: <19900124190723.2.RDP@THOMAS.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>

[Genera-8-0-Beta added.]

    Date: Tue, 23 Jan 90 01:48 EST
    From: RWK@FUJI.ILA.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM (Robert W. Kerns)

    [...  If you're not directly involved
    you may wish to hit Delete now...  I'm don't think I can send
    this directly, so I'm sending it to SLUG anyway.]

[Ditto.]

    [...]

Thanks for your very useful reply about I/O performance issues in
Genera!  I found it very enlightening.

    Also, if you want to complain that what you had to do was too
    hard, and you'd like tool X to make it easier, that might be
    interesting, too.

I think that, after everything else you said, this comment really hits
the nail on the head.  The real problem is that it's simply too hard.
How would a user new to Genera and Symbolics Common Lisp ever ferret out
all of the necessary information?  Perusing the structure of "Reference
Guide to Streams, Files, and I/O" doesn't turn up anything.  The closest
entry for Show Candidates "performance" is "Disk Performance" (which
isn't too close).

But I don't think that anything as sophisticated as a "tool" is even
necessary.  I think that the one big hole which needs to be filled is
*documentation*.  A section called "I/O Performance Issues", perhaps
initially distilled from your fine reply, would go a long way.  

[Aside to Symbolics' doc folks:  Nudge, nudge, ;-) ;-) ]