[Sbcl-devel] 64-bit sbcl

[Duane W. <dw...@dw...>]

Hello,

I have been tasked with experimenting with 64-bit computing and 
specifically to find out if we can improve our performance and use of 
sbcl on 64-bit platforms.

We have been running our sbcl apps FreeBSD 6.2 i386 on Dell Precision 
690's. Since these boxes each have 2 Xeon 5160 (3.0GHz) processors, we 
thought it would be good to take one of them and install FreeBSD for 
amd64 on one, and get 64-bit processing out of it.

So I did that, then installed sbcl from port, so both boxes are running 
sbcl 1.0.7.

Next, I took some sample data that we process with sbcl code, and copied 
it to both boxes and began processing it at the same time.

The amd64 platform was *slower* than the i386.

I'm hoping that this is because there is something I am missing and 
because I don't know what I'm doing as opposed to just being "SOL".

Is it because I need to something special to get sbcl to compile 
correctly for 64-bit execution? Or is it our sbcl code? Or something 
else? If there are any how-to's or anything that can educate me better 
towards this, please point me in the right direction. I have read the 
INSTALL notes, but haven't found anything extra that I'm supposed to do.

(I did add the line "CPUTYPE=nocona" to /etc/make.conf, if that makes 
any difference).

Forgive if I sound like a noob, but I am new to trying *anything* in 
64-bit, and really don't know much about it at all. Disclaimer: I am not 
a software developer and have a very rudimentary understanding of 
programming; but I do need to get this stuff to work.

Thanks for any help and info,
DW