steve@watchfield.com wrote in message news:<9fnmah$1e5l$1@soapbox.cs.bham.ac.uk>...
> Yes! I still recall this with amusement. When the Symbolics hit a
> "major" garbage collection it just went dead indefinitely. My colleague
> Mike Prettejohn (now of Netcraft) phoned the vendors and asked how
> long one of these major collections took. He was told, 'Oh, we've no
> idea. When that happens we just turn the machine off and turn it
> on again.' We never saw any major collection complete. Ever.
>
> [Drift: I still hear people pedalling the claim that "special purpose"
> computers failed because they couldn't achieve the volume necessary to
> compete on price. My experiences with Lisp machines made me think that
> the issue was much more complex than that. So it comes as no surprise to
> me to see the current strong growth in special purpose machines.]
Well, the problem was mainly that the Lisp machines usually had a very small
RAM (mine has 8MW = 40 MB) compared to the large sizes of virtual
memory (I'm using several hundred MBs). If you have more RAM, GC
is ***much*** faster. It was easier to put more memory into a
SUN than into a Lispm (although special memory boards existed
and some customers were running Lisp machines with large RAM) -
especially because the machines had very expensive RAM expansions.
|