benchmarks

[DLA@JASPER.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (David L. Andre)]

Interesting benchmark; thanks for taking the time to forward it.

I ran it on my MacIvory model 2 (2.6MW).  Here are some observations:

The benchmark creates about 2.7 MW of objects.  The ephemeral GC
reclaims all but about 70,000 words of it on the fist pass, and
essentially all of it on the second pass.  As far as I can tell, the
primary thing this benchmark measures is consing and GC.  It's a
good example of a program which performs better with EGC on.  My
results for execution follow:

  EGC On			193 elapsed,  2 sb, 13 paging
  EGC On, linked		170 elapsed,  2 sb, 10 paging
  EGC Off			194 elapsed,  9 sb, 41 paging
  EGC Off, without interrupts	180 elapsed, 10 sb, 43 paging

I would have done more testing, but I'm running low on memory and time.

Note that there's a 12% speedup if you link after loading.  I would
expect about the same speedup on the XL400.  As long as you're running
in safety-low mode on other machines, you might as well cheat on Ivories
too, and use that number for "production".