UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) (09/15/89)
This is really neat! I've freed up about 200 blocks on my boot disk without hardly trying. I have one technical question I hope someone can answer. Will packed files be less likely to load if memory is fragmented? That is, does PP work by loading one big hunk, and then unpacking it into the original lots of little hunks? Or what?
ejkst@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Eric J. Kennedy) (09/17/89)
In article <89258.121835UH2@PSUVM.BITNET> UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) writes: >Will packed files be less likely to load if memory is fragmented? That is, >does PP work by loading one big hunk, and then unpacking it into the >original lots of little hunks? Or what? I suspect that packed files will require more memory to load, since the entire file is loaded into ram and unpacked there. Judging from the speed of loading, the program is compressed into one large hunk, but I don't know that for sure. What I *do* know is that some very large files (Spice and Superplan, at 440kb and 410kb) have trouble loading when I don't have *lots* of free memory available, if they're packed. Particularly spice, since that massive 440kb program is all one huge hunk anyway. So to load spice, I've got to have a 140kb block free (for the compressed version), and a 440kb block free (for the uncompressed vesion). When I didn't have enough for those two blocks, it crashed most ungracefully during the unpacking operation. Now I use uncompressed versions of spice and superplan. Too bad, because that's about 500kb less disk space. -- Eric Kennedy ejkst@cis.unix.pitt.edu