rprohask@orion.oac.uci.edu (Robert Prohaska) (12/08/90)
The latest issue of PC Week contains an article describing a bug found in the memory manager of recent macs. Does this discovery have any ramifications for A/UX users?, ie, does A/UX use the rom memory manager or does it supply its own? Opening directory windows on my iici is occasionally (not always) painfully slow and I'm wondering if this might be the cause. bob prohaska
blob@Apple.COM (Brian Bechtel) (12/09/90)
rprohask@orion.oac.uci.edu (Robert Prohaska) writes: >The latest issue of PC Week contains an article describing >a bug found in the memory manager of recent macs. >Does this discovery have any ramifications for A/UX users?, ie, >does A/UX use the rom memory manager or does it supply its own? I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine that A/UX uses the ROM routines. A/UX has its own memory management (for instance, it can address much more than the 16Mb of memory that MacOS can.) The memory manager bug only affects certain operations with applications that are trying to allocate more master handle blocks. I think it extremely unlikely that this has anything to do with the Finder speed problem you're seeing. >Opening directory windows on my iici is occasionally (not always) >painfully slow and I'm wondering if this might be the cause. That's probably due to a number of factors. MacOS file system calls are emulated by A/UX. The Finder was designed originally for 400K floppies, not large hard disks with a large number of files in a directory, so it's inefficient at caching information about each file in the directory. The Finder tends to call the file system profligately, and on directories with a large number of files, this is slow, even without file system emulation. All the above is speculation on my part; I'm a user, not implementor, of A/UX. --Brian Bechtel blob@apple.com "My opinion, not Apple's"
mgchow@Apple.COM (Mike Chow) (12/09/90)
In article <27609460.28659@orion.oac.uci.edu> rprohask@orion.oac.uci.edu (Robert Prohaska) writes: >The latest issue of PC Week contains an article describing >a bug found in the memory manager of recent macs. > >Does this discovery have any ramifications for A/UX users?, ie, >does A/UX use the rom memory manager or does it supply its own? > >Opening directory windows on my iici is occasionally (not always) >painfully slow and I'm wondering if this might be the cause. > >bob prohaska Try this: open a directory window for the first time under the A/UX Finder. Close it. Now open it again. It's much faster! That's because A/UX needs to compute the extended Macintosh file attributes for each UNIX file in a directory. This information is stored away in a database, so on successive accesses to that directory, the information is already there. Mike Chow mgchow@apple.com