"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

VW: An Efficient Dynamic Runtime

Cincom VisualWorks Smalltalk is an extremely mature, efficient implementation of a dynamic language runtime. James Robertson points to one of the payoffs, running Seaside, on VW Smalltalk...

I tested: Seaside 2.8 in Squeak (using the "one click experience" image), Seaside 2.7 on VW, and Seaside 2.8 on VW - the latter required the under development release that's coming. Here's a summary of what I got:

PlatformSessionsAvg Sessions per SecondAvg Pages per Second
Seaside on VW 7.5971.6217.9
Seaside 2.8 on Squeak3706.1748
Seaside 2.8 on VW 7.65829.779.4

...

Also relevant is this: In Seaside 2.7 on VW, pages per second started off at 34, and then dropped to 10 by the end of the one minute test. Squeak dropped from 50 to 45.5, which is pretty stable. VW 7.6 with Seaside 2.8 started at 81, and dropped to 79.5 - which is even more stable.

If you are looking at Ruby on Rails or a similar dynamic language web framework, there should be several reasons to put Seaside and VW Smalltalk on your list of options.

Update: James updates the tests and brings in Ruby on Rails for comparison. Seeing an "engineering shootout" shape up among these variations would be a fun time. Let various teams engineer the bits out of their own stacks on fairly similar functionality. (Of course a Ruby on Rails on the VW virtual machine would be fun too. :-)

Gemstone Seaside guru, Dale Henrichs, reminds me in the comments:

Patrick, don't forget that there's another mature dynamic runtime system out there that provides transparent persistence along with pretty good performance that even scales across multiple cores... benchmark.
Sorry, Dale!

Get hooked on Seaside, then get hooked on Smalltalk.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Patrick, don't forget that there's another mature dynamic runtime system out there that provides transparent persistence along with pretty good performance that even scales across multiple cores...http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/scaling-seaside-with-gemstones/#gemstoneBenchmark

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.