VA Smalltalk 7.0.1 Available For Download

[Eric Clayberg]

VA Smalltalk 7.0.1 is now available for download.

This is a maintenance release that rolls up all bug fixes for the last year.

It does not include any of the enhancements developed for our upcoming 7.5 release (still planned for the end of the year).

The list of fixes from the readme includes:

2493 - Swapper mutation of AbtTimestamp fails
3834 - Broken link to ResHacker in Smalltalk User's Guide
3885 - AbtTimedWait is not threaded on Windows
4702 - AbtTimestamp wrong for dates earlier that 1901-01-01
6168 - User's Guide "Replacing required map" and "Exporting Components" missing punctuation
6204 - Heterogeneous Details View Colummn
6622 - Missing documentation for 64-bit integer support
6851 - Intermittent slowdown under heavy load on Unix
7156 - solaris includes extra .so files
7400 - Database Guide is incorrect for Multi Row Query Example
7769 - AbtPortableNotebookPageView broken for some users by V6.0.3
8225 - IndexOutOfRange in WkTableWidget due to item deletion
8226 - WkHierarchical listbox icons have gray background
8343 - Sorting makes TableWidget items out of synch
9392 - Scaling a transparent GIF causes it to lose transparency
14316 - AbtComboBox gives walkback when maxlength is set on Unix
14317 - AbtMQqm>>#terminate - dictionary concurrency problem - not thread-safe
14608 - Embedded Shell menubar item translateCoords wrong
14609 - Integer>>#even method has poor performance
14610 - HY024 returned on multi-row ODBC operations with DB2
14611 - Block>>#critical should be categorized as API
14612 - FromDLL test in CgIconTests fails on Windows
14613 - Multiple examples fail due to bitmapPath being an array
14615 - Integer>>#bitAt:put: wrong
14616 - SciSocketManager>>#getHostName passes bad parameter
14617 - Error in implementation of AcoResourceManager active setting
14618 - UNIXProcesses class>>#setUpApplication has redundant toBeLoadedCode
14619 - Invalid characters in SCI trace filename
14620 - Support more than 2GB RAM on Windows
14621 - Inspector has focus on 'Bind to self' checkbox, not items in the list
14622 - Improve SCI trace output
15002 - Remove obsolete OS400 subapplications

[daswartz]

VA Smalltalk 7.0.1 is now available for download.

This is a maintenance release that rolls up all bug fixes for the last year.
...
6851 - Intermittent slowdown under heavy load on Unix
....

Is more information available on this fix? Did this require a VM fix, or was it Smalltalk code? Can the fix be retrofitted into V7.0?

We believe we are seeing occasional behavior which might match these symptoms on a Solaris machine which is becoming heavily loaded.

thanks,
Doug Swartz

[Diane Engles]

Hi Doug,

This fix involved changes, which I believe were confined to the Smalltalk Class SstUnixSocketDemultiplexor and could be easily incorporated into 7.0.0.

Here's some discussion by John O'Keefe, who did the heavy lifting on this one:

"Analysis and testing activity lead to the discovery that the scheduling of sockets that were ready to be processed did not give each socket a fair chance at being processed (round robin scheduling). Instead, the first sockets to be connected were given the highest priority for processing. Socket connecting later got lower and lower priority. This means that an early connected socket with heavy traffic could monopolize the processing.

Socket scheduling was modified to do strictly round-robin scheduling."

Regards,

Diane Engles