Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/06/14/09:49:25
mapson (mapson AT mapson DOT com) wrote:
: Just curious, what is it about this 386 system that makes it so much
: slower than just the slower clock speed would indicate? The lack of
: memory? It certainly runs the compiled programs at the expected rate.
It most certainly is the amount of memory :) Also the hard drive speed
will make a difference.
The reason for this is that the suite of programs which do the
precompiling, compiling, assembly and linking are seperate programs which
communicate through temporary files. Ideally you would set up a large RAM
disk and put the temporary files there; more realistically, most people
have a fairly large disk cache which serves a similar purpose. With only
900K you probably have neither, and these programs are forced to use the
slow disk for everything.
Of course, if the executables also don't physically fit in memory then
they must page to disk, as must their data areas... you can imagine how
hard your disk must be working.
: In fact, a testiment to DJGPP and CWSDPMI- the computer had the
: *original* DOS on it from 10 years ago, and ran this voxel program
: (http://www.cs.yale.edu/HTML/YALE/CS/HyPlans/logan-bret/av/simufo.zip)
: just fine, no obvious glitches. I was amazed.
Presumably this voxel program doesn't suffer in the same way gcc & co do.
Typing go32-v2 will give you some information about what type of memory is
available; I expect your physical value will be extremely low.
In dosemu, before I read the relevant section of the FAQ, I only had about
2 Mb of DPMI memory available - I couldn't even compile and link a
program. This 2 Mb was overall though - it couldn't also use the hard
disk.
For more information on memory usage, see the configuration sections of
the FAQ which make recommendations.
--
George Foot <mert0407 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk>
Merton College, Oxford
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