Mail Archives: opendos/1997/12/15/05:20:35
[reply part 1/2]
On 97/12/14 Glenn Davis asked:
In general:
COD7.02 is COD7.01 + NWDOS Updates 10-15/2 + many bugfixes +
several enhancements over the whole system, but especially in the
kernel, COMMAND.COM, FDISK, DEBUG, and some EMM386/DPMS
improvements.
[CD-ROM]
>Also has CDROM caching supported in nwcache?
No. Caching CD-ROMs using a disk cache written for hard disks is usually
not a very good idea (although MS does so). CD-ROM reads normally
trash the hard disk cache, which is needed much more frequently.
I suggest installing a seperate cache for CD-ROMs. There are solutions,
that even together with NWCACHE installed (using DPMS), take less (DOS)
memory than SMARTDRV, and are faster. Often, it s enough to set the
XMS buffers of the hardware CD-ROM driver to the maximum.
[Disk speed]
>Have any of the disk utilities improved (i.e. speed)... I've had problems with
>small files slowing my disk access times down a bunch which didn't occur
>with M$-DOS 6.22. So basically... does the diskopt and chkdsk utilities
>have improvements in speed?
??? I would not measure disk speed by disk utility speed. DISKOPT
and CHKDSK have not improved in speed. Why, should they?
DISKOPT: Maybe you used a different sorting order in the past, so that
the re-sorting took long?
CHKDSK: Obviously slower than MS-CHKDSK, yes. You want to detect
problems, won t you? Compare COD s CHKDSK with SCANDISK or with
DISKFIX, that s what it does.
Small files and disk speed? Hm, what are your CONFIG.SYS settings for:
BUFFERS[HIGH]= should be 3-10 with a cache, 30+ without a cache.
HIBUFFERS/BUFFERSHIGH is recommended. If small files also
means many files, try to play with this option. With a cache installed,
too high values will *reduce* speed!
FASTOPEN= should be 0 with a cache, and - if you know what you are
doing - up to 512 without a cache. The values differ from MS-DOS! Since
FASTOPEN uses an efficient hash table, each entry takes only 2 bytes.
Hence 512 is 1KB, not several KB as under MS-DOS.
Note, that though FASTOPEN is reliable, it s dangerous, if you don t take
it into account that it s loaded. After physically moving files (e.g. DISKOPT),
you must reboot, or you will get your disk garbled.
If small files also means frequent usage of these files, FASTOPEN is
what you want. With a cache installed, too high values will *reduce*
speed!
[part 2 following]
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Matthias Paul
eMail: <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Web: http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html
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