benchamrks on Linux and Cygwin/VMWare

[Stephen Weeks]

> Not bad (for an evil world).  I would think that as long as you stay away
> from system calls VMWare wouldn't cost you any thing.  For fully computational
> programs, I guess that that means that only gc might be slowed down.  Did you
> notice any big changes in that?

Remember that VMWare is emulating at the machine level.  So it's not
system calls that matter (although that does hurt at the Cygwin
level).  What matters for VMWare is when the guest OS does something
to the machine.  For example, whenever windows decides to page or to
manipulate the mmu, VMWare must intervene.  So, there is a cost in
most programs, except those that have very small working sets and are
completely computational.

My guess is that the big slowdowns in the other cases were due more to
Cygwin and having less memory in the virtual machine than to VMWare
itself, but I don't really know.  I will increase my virtual machine
RAM (currently 100M) when I start playing around with self-compiles.
Maybe I will rerun the benchmarks then.  I'll also run some with
@MLton gc-summary.

BTW, this means that the next release is getting pretty close
(relatively speaking).