Benchmarking Guide

Micro-benchmarks are notoriously inaccurate, in any system. Here are some guidelines you should read carefully before trying to construct an accurate benchmark in the Strongtalk system. This is very important because there is one big 'gotcha' associated with running benchmarks from a "do it" in Strongtalk:

How we did Benchmarking

When we benchmarked the system ourselves, we assembled a large suite of accepted OO benchmarks, such as Richards, DeltaBlue (a constraint solver), the Stanford benchmarks, Slopstones and Smopstones. These benchmarks are already in the image, if you want to run them. Try evaluating "VMSuite runBenchmarks" and look at the code it runs. If you want a real performance comparison, run these on other VMs.

As an example, I put a couple of very small microbenchmarks that are run the right way in the system tour (the code is in the Test class). You can try running them on other Smalltalks as a start.

Other benchmarkling problems people have been having