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[James Hague]

>    in the AXD301 we have also found that cache is massively important. in one of
> our benchmarks a doubling of the cache size improved performance ~50% (not a
> typical value). indeed, we often see a loss of performance when we try
> hipe-compiling (our applications are not well-suited to hipe, and we lose on the
> cache).

Hmmm...makes me wonder if cdr-coding (or the like) would help out. 
It's traditionally not done in in Lisp systems, because you can modify
existing cons cells in Lisp.  But not in Erlang.  You'd lose tag bits,
though, which is a huge deal.  I'd bet that someone looked into this a
long time back :)