noelroy@kean.mun.ca (Noel Roy, Economics Dept., Memorial University) (09/01/89)
Can anybody tell me whether it makes any sense to load FASTOPEN and a disk cache at the same time? Or am I just wasting RAM? Noel Roy/Memorial University
kens@hplsla.HP.COM (Ken Snyder) (09/06/89)
In my PCKWIK manual it specifically states that when caching is on, fastopen will give no performance improvement. Sounds like you are just wasting memory. Ken
brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian A. Onn) (09/09/89)
In article <5190041@hplsla.HP.COM> kens@hplsla.HP.COM (Ken Snyder) writes: >In my PCKWIK manual it specifically states that when caching is on, fastopen >will give no performance improvement. Sounds like you are just wasting memory. > >Ken This may not be true. I wanted to try this out myself, and ran some tests. I used the PC Tech Journal Benchmark series of programs, on a 16Mhz 386, with PC-KWIK cache installed and 384k of extended memory cache. As outlined in the manual, I set BUFFERS really small (=5) and did not use FASTOPEN. The disk used was a Maxtor 1140 (117 meg formatted), using DOS 4.01 and one large disk partition. The PC Tech disk benchmark gave something like 46 seconds to complete the benchmark. With BUFFERS=25, the benchmark completed in around 27 seconds. With FASTOPEN installed, the benchmark completed in about 23 seconds. I did this about two months ago, and so don't have accurate benchmark figures, but you can get the idea. I think that the additional performance gain from the DOS BUFFERS statement and FASTOPEN is seen due to the reduced number of switches to and from protected mode to get at the extended memory. It is likely that FASTOPEN and many BUFFERS only gets in the way when you have an Expanded Memory cache. Brian. -- +-------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ | Brian Onn | UUCP: ..!uunet!attcan!ncrcan!brian | | NCR Canada Ltd. | INTERNET: Brian.Onn@Toronto.NCR.COM | +-------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+