[comp.sys.mac.hypercard] HC on a Network. QUESTIONS & HELP PLEASE

ciru@fennel.cc.uwa.oz.au (05/22/91)

Before I begin, I have to confess that 'networking' is all very new to me so
please forgive me if I'm missing something or seem to be asking naive
questions.
I recently (a couple of days ago) placed our Purchasing/Grant Management sytem
(two stacks) on a small network of three Macs located around the building.

For your info, we are running Hypercard 2.0v2 locally on all the Macs (one
IIcx and two IIsis) over an ethernet network using CAP version 5.0. (ethertalk
phase one)  The Macs are accessing the Hypercard stacks located on a 600mb
Fujitsu disk attached to a recently purchased Sun workstation.  The main
ordering station (the IIcx) has Apple's Internet Router running on it although
at this point it is not doing much routing (if anything, a few small print
jobs).  My experience at this point is only with this IIcx and not the other
Macs.


1.  Firstly, can anyone tell me why Hypercard always does a 'little' disk
accessing (read or write?) after you click on a simple button (even if the
button etc doesn't do anything much).  This is not a problem on a local hard
disk, however, when using stacks on a server over a network, which slows this
disk accessing down a little, the delay causes confusion for the users because
'things' are not responding when they click on buttons etc while this
accessing is going on.
I know that Hypercard has to save when something is changed or added, however,
is there any reason why it seems to always have to access the disk even after
clicking on a button?  Is there any way to eliminate or reduce such disk
activity?

2.  Has anyone ever discovered a file called HyperTemp 1 on their sever disk
after using stacks on a network?  After the first day of running the stacks on
the server I discoverd such a file which appeared to be a stack as it had the
right file creator and type.  However, Hypercard would not open it reporting
that it was not a Hypercard stack.  Snooping through with a text editor (by
changing it's Type to TEXT... a bit unorthodox I know!) I discovered after a
heap of non sensical characters, scripts from the stacks I was using.
I can't remember reading about this before.  Does anyone know what is going on
here and why Hypercard (or whatever) created this file.

3.  Can anyone who has perhaps had experience with using Hypercard stacks over
a network perhaps offer some advice on how to 'clean up' or optimize such
stacks so that they run at an optimum speed.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR ANY HELP POSTED.

***********************************************************
* Mike Schon-Hegrad                                       *   	  
* Research Officer                                        *
* Western Australian Research Institute for Child Health  *
* Princess Margaret Hospital                              *
* Thomas Street, Subiaco                                  *
* West Australia     6008                                 *
*                                                         *
* CIRU@FENNEL.CC.UWA.OZ.AU                                *
***********************************************************

eallen@mercury.sybase.com (Ed Allen) (05/24/91)

HyperCard does a lot of disk access because of the auto-save. Run a stack
with an icon animation and you'll see the disk access each time it changes
the icon of the button to save the new icon. If your button has this kind
of effect it will access disk, I think it does so for Hiliting the button,
and a bunch of other things where you wouldn't expect it a priori.

HyperTemp 1 is the new file created when you compact a stack.  Normally,
the compact operation goes to completion, the old stack gets deleted, and
HyperTemp1 gets renamed with the stack name.  If you do a compact operation
while running on a big monitor with the finder window showing the stack
visible under multifinder, you will see this operation.  This is also the
reason the stack jumps around in the finder when you look for it after
compacting.

**** NOTE to HyperCard Team**** It would be really nice if you can have the
compacted stack put into the same place in the finder window for the folder
that the original stack was.  It's annoying to always be reorganizing icons.

Ed Allen eallen@sybase.com

jkc@Apple.COM (John Kevin Calhoun) (05/24/91)

In article <12940@sybase.sybase.com> eallen@mercury.UUCP (Ed Allen) writes:

>HyperTemp 1 is the new file created when you compact a stack.  Normally,
>the compact operation goes to completion, the old stack gets deleted, and
>HyperTemp1 gets renamed with the stack name.  If you do a compact operation
>while running on a big monitor with the finder window showing the stack
>visible under multifinder, you will see this operation.  This is also the
>reason the stack jumps around in the finder when you look for it after
>compacting.
>
>**** NOTE to HyperCard Team**** It would be really nice if you can have the
>compacted stack put into the same place in the finder window for the folder
>that the original stack was.  It's annoying to always be reorganizing icons.

The problem is actually in the 6.x Finder.  It's fixed in System 7.0.

Kevin Calhoun
jkc@apple.com