harry@aeshq.UUCP (Harry Pulley) (06/22/91)
Ralf Brown's spawn replacement routines have been mentioned in the recent discussions on how to shrink the size of your program. In Ralf's doc's, he says that his code may fail under DOS 5 as he depends on the size of the PSP. DOS3.3 has lots of room, and 4 has some, but he thought that 5 might have made the PSP large enough (or the used portion anyway) that SPAWNO would not work. Well, I have been running with my own replacement for COMMAND.COM for some time now (under 3.3); this program is obviously one I don't want to have in memory when my applications are running. I am VERY PLEASED to announce that Ralf's code still works properly. The XMS swapping is lightning fast. I no longer bother to load a RAM disk; the swap is much faster when it goes to the DOS5 HIMEM XMS driver. I have only been running DOS5 for a little while now (except for the beta testers, haven't we all?) so I cannot be certain that SPAWNO will work in all environments, but it still works for me. My shell uses SPAWNO for every program I run, so if feel highly confident that I won't have any problems. It's interesting to note that the task swapper also swaps to XMS and disk, so you may wish to set the XMS enable variable (in your code) to 0 if you use the task swapper alot. This way your program will only swap to disk (or EMS, but there is also an enable variable for EMS). If there is a problem with SPAWNO and DOS5 that someone has found, could they please let me know? Harry. harry@aeshq.UUCP