64bit VW experiences

Dear VisualWorkers,

64bit VisualWorks is now a year or so old and I'm wondering, what are
your experiences with it. I'm specially interested on large images and
experiences with them:

1.What are the bigest image sizes achieved so far?
2.What kind of problems you experienced?
3.How is garbage collection working on such big images?
4.How good is reliability?

Thanks
Janko


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Janko Mivšek
Svetovalec za informatiko
EraNova d.o.o.
Ljubljana, Slovenija
www.eranova.si
tel:  01 514 22 55
faks: 01 514 22 56
gsm: 031 674 565

Ditto, lets hear the exciting stories.

Thanks!

-Boris

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+1.604.689.0322
DeepCove Labs Ltd.
4th floor 595 Howe Street
Vancouver, Canada V6C 2T5

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Thank you.

-----Original Message-----
From: Janko Mivšek [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 5:23 AM
To: 'VWNC'
Subject: 64bit VW experiences

Dear VisualWorkers,

64bit VisualWorks is now a year or so old and I'm wondering, what are
your experiences with it. I'm specially interested on large images and
experiences with them:

1.What are the bigest image sizes achieved so far?
2.What kind of problems you experienced?
3.How is garbage collection working on such big images?
4.How good is reliability?

Thanks
Janko


--
Janko Mivšek
Svetovalec za informatiko
EraNova d.o.o.
Ljubljana, Slovenija
www.eranova.si
tel:  01 514 22 55
faks: 01 514 22 56
gsm: 031 674 565

Hi guys,

I'm running the CST05a-dec05.iso version of 64-bit linux VW.
I'm using this under Ubuntu v6.06 Dapper AMD64

Everything installed easy and appears to be fine.

My problem is, that while quite a number of packages load from Store totally
fine (using PostgreSQL), upon loading some certain packages, VW just
segfaults.  The 32 bit VM on the same box has no problem with the same
packages.

It seems fairly bizzare, I loaded an older version of a package from store,
and then the latest version, and that is OK, but if I always load the latest
version straight away, it always segfaults.  Because of this behavior I'm to
assume that it may likely not be an operating system related issue.  Perhaps
it may be related to some initialization going on in the packages?  How do I
prevent Store from executing any post-load initialization of the packages?

Obviously I haven't gotten very far with the VW 64-bit version because of
this.

Has anyone seen anything like this before, or have any idea where to begin?
I suppose I could try out a debug version of the VM and go from there, but
just curious if this issue has been seen and/or resolved before.

Thanks, Ian

Just to follow up with this..

If I load the VW parcel Wave-Server-Base.pcl, it segfaults everytime.
Even more specifically, it seems to always segfault in
findMethod in src/tran/nmlookup.c:519

Can anyone using the 64-bit VM on any other OS version confirm or deny that
this is a problem?

Thanks, Ian

Ian Upright wrote:
> Just to follow up with this..
>
> If I load the VW parcel Wave-Server-Base.pcl, it segfaults everytime.
> Even more specifically, it seems to always segfault in
> findMethod in src/tran/nmlookup.c:519

This sounds like a method is recompiled, but the cache of native code is
not or incorrectly purged. This doesn't explain why it only happens on
64 bit engines though...

As a workaround you could try to do your 'load old version, load latest
version' trick and then publish it binary, load this binary version from
then on...



HTH,

Reinout
-------

If anyone has any kind of VW 64-bit version running well on any flavour of
OS, I'd love to hear about it, and what you're using.

Thanks, Ian

Ian Upright wrote:
> If anyone has any kind of VW 64-bit version running well on any flavour of
> OS, I'd love to hear about it, and what you're using.

I'm not using 64-bit VW regularly (yet) but I've done some limited
testing on AMD64 Linux (Suse and Gentoo) and saw no problems.

-Martin

Hi Martin..  Do you have any specific OS versions or kernel versions?

Thanks, Ian

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin McClure [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 6:30 PM
To: Ian Upright
Cc: 'VWNC'
Subject: Re: 64bit VW

Ian Upright wrote:
> If anyone has any kind of VW 64-bit version running well on any flavour of
> OS, I'd love to hear about it, and what you're using.

I'm not using 64-bit VW regularly (yet) but I've done some limited
testing on AMD64 Linux (Suse and Gentoo) and saw no problems.

-Martin

Ian Upright wrote:
> Hi Martin..  Do you have any specific OS versions or kernel versions?

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version 9 Patch 3. uname -a on this system
yields
2.6.5-7.202.7-smp #1 SMP Tue Nov 29 14:32:53 UTC 2005 x86_64 x86_64
x86_64 GNU/Linux

I keep my Gentoo 64-bit machine fairly up to date with Gentoo stable, so
it was running whatever kernel was current at the time. Since this can
change on a daily basis with Gentoo, I don't recall what kernel version
I was running the last time I played with 64-bit VW. It was certainly a
newer kernel than the SUSE box has -- I started with a 2.6.7 kernel two
years ago, this week it's running a 2.6.17 kernel, and it's been through
just about everything in between.

Linux kernel and libc backward compatibility is reasonably good -- the
only versions where I'd expect to run into problems would be those older
than the VW 64-bit VM was built on. I don't know what versions those are.

-Martin