To: enok AT lysator DOT liu DOT se
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Optimize your PC 
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 95 08:49:07 +0200
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>

> I simply used make to compiled around 20 c-files and then link them.
> I used 4MB RAM and then added a 4MB simm to get 8MB and compiled again.
> Conclusions: It looks like 4MB and 8MB doesn't differ much unless you use
> the extra space for diskcache. A cache size of 2048 kB is enough to hold

Your conclusions might be skewed by the size of the files you compiled.
When compiling C source, GCC might need upto 2.5 MBytes of RAM for
large files (several thousand lines).  For C++ source, this will go up
to 3.5-4 MBytes even for files under 1000 lines.  So unless you have
that much free physical RAM *after* SmartDrive is installed (and I
agree it must be for good performance), you will someday see painfully
slow compiles due to paging.  When you test the effect of installed
RAM, be sure to compile large as well as small files, and check C++
compilations, too.

My recommendation is to get a 16 MByte machine and to give 3-4 MBytes to
a disk cache.  This should win even for large projects.

> Emm386.exe should be installed for optimum performance. (Why ???)

Do I understand correctly this was HIMEM without EMM386?  If so,
try working without HIMEM also.  HIMEM alone does some bad things
to DJGPP, I don't know why (I also don't care, because HIMEM does
no good to any program, so I can't imagine why somebody might want
using it).