Poor Sun timings, as competition...

[jrs@atc.boeing.com (Ross Stenstrom)]

There is a posting from the sun-spots mailing list that describes
an experiment on the current Suns.  It concludes that when executables
exceed 16M (probably bytes) their performance becomes markedly
poorer.  It draws a reasoned conclusion based upon a bunch of nitty
gritty Sun details about why and it is a true hardware limitation.

Now my question or comment, we are periodically asked why we don't just
run Lucid on a Sun or KCL which is FREE.  Obviously this treats Suns
as a free resource which has its own implications (there are also Sun
managers who don't/won't/can't do Symbolic's who would seem to have an
interest in dropping the Symbolics, particularly where I used to work...).
Has anyone (else) read this study?  Does anyone with deep Sun knowledge
support the conclusions?  Can we use this as a major refutation of the
"just use a Sun, they're faster and cheaper anyway" mentality?

I'm too timid to post someone else's writing to the net.  The study is
available by anonymous ftp from titan.rice.edu, doing a cd to sun-spots
and a get of v9n257 (presumably an edition number of "sun-spots").

Interestingly enough, the study was really about large executables and
suggested that large lisp systems with (intrinsic?) poor locality of
reference might be most affected.

If you can't ftp I'll try to send you a copy by mail, there may be an
automatic mechanism at sun-spots.

Ross Stenstrom
Boeing High Technology Center
Bellevue, WA
jrs@atc.boeing.com