SLUG90 Session on Performance Issues

[cerys@BBN.COM (Dan Cerys)]

Performance: Pitfalls & Tuning 
Request for participants.

I've agreed to chair the panel at the upcoming SLUG conference on
performance issues.  I am looking for some additional speakers to round out
the panel.  The plan is to have each speaker give a short presentation
(10-20 min) and then discuss questions that conference attendees might
have.  

Performance issues are often what determine the success or failure of an
application (and the tolerance of the developer in building the
application).  There have been a number of cases where the application has
had a wonderful set of features, but has failed, because it was too slow to
use.  There have even been a few cases of this with Genera itself!  Most
often performance bottlenecks become significant in interactive systems,
but for large computational tasks (e.g., theorem proving), a few
performance problems can make a manageable problem infeasible.  Some
possible topics that could deal with these problems:

- System tuning
  - how to configure and optimize your environment (hardware & software) 
    for speed in both development and delivery.
- Application tuning
  - what tools and techniques can be used?
  - ways to prevent problems (how to write optimal Common Lisp code)
  - how to identify and deal with problems (eg, metering)
- Performance Considerations for different architectures
  - 36XX vs Ivory
  - conventional (UNIX) processors
- Communication Bottlenecks
  - byte stream protocols
  - RPC efficiency
  - when is coarse-grained parallelism (multiple machines) warranted?

If you are interested in participating in this session, please let me know
by next Wednesday (May 30), if possible, although the earlier the better
(this is a session on speed, after all!).

Dan