Mail Archives: opendos/2000/04/30/15:46:39
Hi Joseph,
As always, excuse me for my poor english.
On 30 Apr 00 10:19:26 MDT, Joseph Morris wrote:
> I have 96MB of memory, so a larger disk cache was the first obvious step.
> NWcache seems to max out at 7MB, I found smartdrv to be faster, anyhow.
> Going above 8MB in smartdrv doesn't seem to give much performance increase.
NWcache' max is a little above 7 MB (7670 kB IIRC), which is IMHO the most
effective amount anyway. Smartdrv uses MUCH more mem itself (38 vs 22 kB),
and is not much faster. You can improve the working of both programs with
larger buffers. You can try different settings for the buffers and delay.
Caching always depend on how big the files are, how many it are and how
often you access them.
> Are there any other decent disk caches?
Not much and not for free. If you find one,...please tell me.
> In config.sys, I have:
> HIBUFFERS=30
10 or 15 may be enough.
> HIFILES=60
> HIFCBS=4,4
> Increasing the number of FCBS is something I'll try later on, but since this
> seems to be related to searches and locked files, I'm not sure it will help
> much.
FCBS isn't much used anymore anyway. And if you increase them, you must
increase the HIFILES as well (FCBS= takes its handles from the amount of
FILES=).
> Having seen how fluidly the my program runs when compiled for Linux, or even
> the DOS version run in Windows 95, I'm a bit concerned about how slow it is
> running under DRDOS.
AFAIK, DOS programs are always faster in DOS than in Win 95.
Some other things that improved my disk access:
- Unload Logitech mouse driver (don't ask me why).
- Larger clusters.
- Faster HDD (HDDs have different speed for read than for write than for
search, watch this if you know what's more important).
- HDD with more cache (IBM has them with 4 MB, IIRC).
- Faster disk controller.
- SCSI or (SCSI-)raid controller.
- Faster RAM.
- Better cooling.
- Let the DOS PATH statement point at only one partition per drive (the
shorter the better, anyway), or only at VDISK with all links and .BATs
on it.
- Use diskopt or defrag frequently. Esp. before installing new apps or
large files.
- Disk access looks to be faster on 'empty' partitions than on 'filled'
partitions.
-- Best regards,
-- YoYo.
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