From: mert0407 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk (George Foot) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: DJGPP on a 386 Date: 14 Jun 1997 05:44:26 GMT Organization: Oxford University, England Lines: 41 Message-ID: <5ntb3q$7tv@news.ox.ac.uk> References: <33a1d6f2 DOT 4203083 AT news DOT cis DOT yale DOT edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: sable.ox.ac.uk To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk 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 Merton College, Oxford