[gambit-list] Gambit-C 4.0 beta 13

Guillaume Germain germaing at iro.umontreal.ca
Thu May 12 18:41:19 EDT 2005


On Thu, 12 May 2005 ben at fuhok.net wrote:

> My guess is that this problem doesn't have much to do with your gambit
> installation or with the speed of compiled vs interpreted code.

I don't think that's correct.  Gambit's serialization of continuation is 
slow, at least in part due to linear lookups being done on all the 
serialized data when constructing the external representation.  Because of 
the closure representation used in the interpreter a lot of data gets 
included.  The new table facility might be used to help implement this in 
a more efficient way.


> The example passes the continuation around via a query parameter, not by 
> a hidden form field (though the continuation is included there too).

Note that it doesn't matter if you're using GET whether you pass the 
continuation in a hidden form field or by tacking it to the URL.


> I bet that the example would run very well if the continuation was
> passed around using POST instead of GET.

It would still be slow.  I use continuation serialization to implement 
process migration in my system and even a "small continuation" will take 
around a second or two to serialize.  When I was including libraries like 
SSAX or htmlprag, the system was hanging for minutes.  At first I thought 
my program was stuck in an infinite loop, but that's because I was 
underestimating infinity :)


Guillaume



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