ejkst@cisunx.UUCP (Eric J. Kennedy) (01/18/89)
I noticed some behavior that I thought rather odd today. I have AmigaSpice and Superbase Professional on my hard disk. Spice takes up 445K on the disk and SbPro takes up 354K. When I execute these programs, however, spice loads in just over 3 seconds, while sbpro takes over 13 seconds to load! When spice loads, the hard disk light stays on steadily, and I can hear the heads moving "tick...tick...tick...". When sbpro loads, the drive does its usual flickering and seeking all over creation. I can think of two possible explanations for this. First, sbpro is badly fragmented and spice isn't. I don't buy this because sbpro was installed during a restore to a virgin, reformated disk, while spice was added after a few days of heavy use. If anything should be fragmented, it should be spice. Second, is it possible that the spice executable is one large hunk, while the sbpro executable has the usual multiple small hunks? This should load faster, but wouldn't load at all if there wasn't a large enough contiguous piece of free ram. Can anyone verify or oppose these guesses? How can I tell if a file is fragmented or how many hunks are in an executable? -- Eric Kennedy ejkst@cisunx.UUCP
jesup@cbmvax.UUCP (Randell Jesup) (01/19/89)
In article <15043@cisunx.UUCP> ejkst@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Eric J. Kennedy) writes: > >I noticed some behavior that I thought rather odd today. I have >AmigaSpice and Superbase Professional on my hard disk. Spice takes up >445K on the disk and SbPro takes up 354K. When I execute these >programs, however, spice loads in just over 3 seconds, while sbpro >takes over 13 seconds to load! When spice loads, the hard disk light >stays on steadily, and I can hear the heads moving >"tick...tick...tick...". When sbpro loads, the drive does its usual >flickering and seeking all over creation. Yup. There are 114 (if memory holds) hunks in sbpro. This slows loads down to a crawl. FFS (and LoadSeg) are much more efficient when they have nice, big hunks to play with. And you're right, if they are very large there may be a problem loading them on a small-memory, fragmented system. You can, however, specify to blink to merge hunks, but only up to some upper size bound. This gets you a small number of hunks, but not gigantic ones. >Can anyone verify or oppose these guesses? How can I tell if a file is >fragmented or how many hunks are in an executable? Run dumpobj on it. (or was that objdump?) -- Randell Jesup, Commodore Engineering {uunet|rutgers|allegra}!cbmvax!jesup
jms@antares.UUCP (Joe Smith) (01/20/89)
In article <15043@cisunx.UUCP> ejkst@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Eric J. Kennedy) writes: >I have AmigaSpice and Superbase Professional on my hard disk. Spice takes up >445K on the disk and SbPro takes up 354K. When I execute these >programs, however, spice loads in just over 3 seconds, while sbpro >takes over 13 seconds to load! When spice loads, the hard disk light >stays on steadily, and I can hear the heads moving >"tick...tick...tick...". When sbpro loads, the drive does its usual >flickering and seeking all over creation. How much of Spice gets loaded? For a program of that size, I wouldn't be surprised if it uses overlays. The 3 seconds may be how long it takes to load in only the first section of the program. How much of that 13 seconds is actually program load time? Some programs take a long time to load libraries, read the FONTS: directory, preload fonts, or locate other files on disk. If SbPro does all this before it opens its fist window, then it would appear to be slow even if the program itself was loaded quickly. Seeking all over creation sounds like it's accessing multiple files. -- Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | JMS@antares.Tymnet.COM[131.146.3.1] or jms@opus McDonnell Douglas FSCO | UUCP: {ames|pyramid}oliveb!tymix!antares!jms PO Box 49019, MS-D21 | PDP-10: JMS@F74.Tymnet CA license plate: "POPJ P," San Jose, CA 95161-9019 | (this line reserved for my Amiga 2000)
ejkst@cisunx.UUCP (Eric J. Kennedy) (01/21/89)
In article <355@antares.UUCP> jms@antares.UUCP (Joe Smith) writes: <In article <15043@cisunx.UUCP> ejkst@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Eric J. Kennedy) writes: <>I have AmigaSpice and Superbase Professional on my hard disk. Spice takes up <>445K on the disk and SbPro takes up 354K. When I execute these <>programs, however, spice loads in just over 3 seconds, while sbpro <>takes over 13 seconds to load! When spice loads, the hard disk light <How much of Spice gets loaded? For a program of that size, I wouldn't be <surprised if it uses overlays. The 3 seconds may be how long it takes to <load in only the first section of the program. All of it. No overlays. That's why it requires 1.1 Meg to run. <How much of that 13 seconds is actually program load time? Some programs take <a long time to load libraries, read the FONTS: directory, preload fonts, or <locate other files on disk. If SbPro does all this before it opens its fist There may be some of that, but I don't think so. I generally already have the libraries loaded, and sbpro doesn't read the fonts: directory or load any devices to my knowledge. It does scan the current directory, but not until after the windows are opened. -- Eric Kennedy ejkst@cisunx.UUCP