Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 13:27:00 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: ronen AT friendly DOT co DOT il
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: DOS write buffers & DJGPP?
In-Reply-To: <32cfc7cd.31390016@news.netvision.net.il>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970106132121.24131C-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


On Sun, 5 Jan 1997, Ronen Friedman wrote:

> We've concluded that some internal DOS buffer was filled, and DOS
>  is dumping it onto our very slow FLASH disk. We tried using
> _flush_disk_cache() on convenient times. This reduces the frequency
> of the problem, but DOS still feels free to stop everything from time
> to time to perform the I/O.

`_flush_disk_cache' is only appropriate if you load a disk cache such as 
SmartDrv on your machine.  If not, use `sync' or `fsync'.

> Can I control this behaviour? should I do things differently?
> Or is our explanation totally wrong?

You didn't explain how would you like to ``control this behavior''.  
After all, the buffers must be flushed from time to time anyway, and the 
writes to the flash memory *are* slow.  So what exactly would you like to 
accomplish?

If you don't need all of the log file, but just its last X Mbytes, you 
might install a RAM disk of a suitable size and make the log file 
cyclically re-used.