wolf@cbnewsh.att.com (thomas.wolf) (05/16/91)
Ok, I've tried: SMARTDRV, PowerPak, and Hyperdisk on my 386 compatible. Although SMARTDRV is supposed to be the dummest of the bunch, under Desqview, it is significantly faster than the other two (my "benchmark" is a "make" of a program) -- or I should say that the other two become slower than SMARTDRV under Desqview. I have a 4Meg machine. I tried these three caches with identical size: 1Meg. Has anyone noticed similar behaviour with these programs? Has anyone found an optimal set of options to be used with either Hyperdisk or PowerPak? (Since I already bought the latter, I'd be especially grateful...sorry no monetary rewards :-) On a related issue: PowerPak comes with a command-line editor that does not appear to work under Desqview. Is there a way to make it work? Any help would be appreciated. Tom -- +-------------------------------------+ "Stupid" questions are better than | Thomas Wolf | (201) 615-4789 | no questions at all. No answer is | Bell Labs, NJ | wolf@mink.att.com | better than a stupid one. +-------------------------------------+
zap@netcom.COM (Paul Eastham) (05/16/91)
In article <1991May16.022630.20602@cbnewsh.att.com> wolf@cbnewsh.att.com (thomas.wolf) writes: >Ok, I've tried: SMARTDRV, PowerPak, and Hyperdisk on my 386 compatible. >Although SMARTDRV is supposed to be the dummest of the bunch, under >Desqview, it is significantly faster than the other two (my "benchmark" ... >Has anyone noticed similar behaviour with these programs? Has anyone >found an optimal set of options to be used with either Hyperdisk >or PowerPak? (Since I already bought the latter, I'd be especially ... I had similar results with SMARTDRV and Hyperdisk, not only in Desq, but in Windows3 and everywhere else, strangely enough, despite Hyperdisk's claim of being many times faster than SMARTDRV. A friend of mine had PowerPak and claimed it to be all but useless, especially (but not just) with Desqview. Regardless to say, he never uses it. If he has any good setups for PowerPak, I'l post them. -- -------- | ---- | ZAP!! | / | A.K.A. Paul Eastham | /_ | zap@netcom.com | / | Los Altos, CA -------- "Ack!" -- Bill the Cat
w8sdz@rigel.acs.oakland.edu (Keith Petersen) (05/17/91)
wolf@cbnewsh.att.com (thomas.wolf) writes: >I've tried: SMARTDRV, PowerPak, and Hyperdisk on my 386 compatible. >Although SMARTDRV is supposed to be the dummest of the bunch, under >Desqview, it is significantly faster than the other two (my "benchmark" >is a "make" of a program) -- or I should say that the other two become >slower than SMARTDRV under Desqview. >I have a 4Meg machine. I tried these three caches with identical >size: 1Meg. > >Has anyone noticed similar behaviour with these programs? Has anyone >found an optimal set of options to be used with either Hyperdisk >or PowerPak? (Since I already bought the latter, I'd be especially >grateful...sorry no monetary rewards :-) I am a registered user of HyperDisk with DESQview. My 386/16 has one meg below and one meg above for a total of two meg of RAM. I talked to Roger Cross (the author) to ask him what he recommends for DESQview. The key is to set your buffers to 5 with no /X option. The /X option causes DOS to automatically allocate 30 buffers no matter how small a number you specify. My CONFIG.SYS: DEVICE=C:\QEMM\QEMM386.SYS RAM ROM DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /R:1 C:\BIN2\NANSI.SYS DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /R:2 C:\BIN2\HYPERDKX.EXE HS C:920:256 T:3 INSTALL=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.COM /TSR /R:1 C:\DOS\SHARE.EXE SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /P /E:512 BREAK=OFF BUFFERS=5 STACKS=0,0 FILES=8 LASTDRIVE=C And in AUTOEXEC.BAT: C:\QEMM\LOADHI /R:1 QEMM\FILES 30 This is MS-DOS 4.01. If you are using an earlier version, move the "INSTALL" line to AUTOEXEC.BAT (deleting the INSTALL= at the start of the line). Notice the HYPERDKX command. It specifies a 920K cache while I'm not running DESQview, and 256K while in DESQview. Also specified are cache hard disk only, staged writes on, writes delayed until 3 seconds of no activity. The T3 made quite a difference, especially during high speed serial communications (I use a USR HST Dual-Standard modem with the interface locked at 19200). Keith - - - Keith Petersen Co-SysOp, Detroit Download Central 313-885-3956 (212/V22bis/HST/V32/V42bis) Internet: w8sdz@vela.acs.oakland.edu, w8sdz@eddie.mit.edu, w8sdz@brl.mil Uucp: uunet!umich!vela!w8sdz BITNET: w8sdz@OAKLAND
smsmith@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Stephen M Smith) (05/18/91)
In article <6450@vela.acs.oakland.edu> w8sdz@wsmr-simtel20.army.mil writes: > >I talked to Roger Cross (the author) to ask him what he recommends for >DESQview. The key is to set your buffers to 5 with no /X option. The >/X option causes DOS to automatically allocate 30 buffers no matter >how small a number you specify. I don't think that is correct. When I use the /x option DOS doesn't allocate any extra memory; QEMM just puts those allocations in high memory. Here's the proof: 1) Without the /x option my config.sys looks like this: DEVICE=C:\QEMM\QEMM386.SYS RAM NRH FR=C800 DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /R:1 C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.SYS 256/A DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /R:2 C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.SYS INSTALL=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.COM /TSR /R:2 C:\DOS\SHARE.EXE BUFFERS=20 FILES=20 STACKS=0,0 BREAK=ON Here's what Manifest says about DOS with this configuration: DOS / Overview DOS version 4.00 Kernel: 45K* Drivers: 2.7K Memory Area Size Description Base Data: 12K 0070 - 02CC 9.5K IO Added Data: 0.9K 02CD - 0BB3 35K MSDOS Total: 60K 0BB4 - 0C61 2.7K Drivers 0C62 - 0C9A 0.9K 15 FILES FILES=20 0C9B - 0CAB 0.3K DOS Data FCBS=16,8 0CAC - 0F46 10K 20 BUFFERS BUFFERS=20 0F47 - 0F63 0.5K Drive List LASTDRIVE=E =====Base data ends at 61K====== STACKS=0,0 DCF1 - DD2C 0.9K 16 FCBS Notice that 20 BUFFERS take up 10K of RAM in memory area 0CAC-0F46. My memory without the /x option looks like this: 655360 bytes total memory 655360 bytes available 586096 largest executable program size 2) But WITH the /x option here is my config.sys file and the results I get with it: DEVICE=C:\QEMM\QEMM386.SYS RAM NRH FR=C800 DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /R:1 C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.SYS 256/A DEVICE=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.SYS /R:2 C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.SYS INSTALL=C:\QEMM\LOADHI.COM /TSR /R:2 C:\DOS\SHARE.EXE BUFFERS=20/x FILES=20 STACKS=0,0 BREAK=ON DOS / Overview DOS version 4.00 Kernel: 45K* Drivers: 2.7K Memory Area Size Description Base Data: 1.7K 0070 - 02CC 9.5K IO Added Data: 0.9K 02CD - 0BB3 35K MSDOS Total: 50K 0BB4 - 0C61 2.7K Drivers 0C62 - 0C9A 0.9K 15 FILES FILES=20 0C9B - 0CAB 0.3K DOS Data FCBS=16,8 0CAC - 0CAD 0K Buffer List BUFFERS=30/X 0CAE - 0CCA 0.5K Drive List LASTDRIVE=E =====Base data ends at 51K====== STACKS=0,0 DCF1 - DD2C 0.9K 16 FCBS Notice that with the /x option the Buffer list reads 0K memory! My memory then should be 10K more than what it was. This is in fact what it is: 655360 bytes total memory 655360 bytes available 596736 largest executable program size I thus get 10K more base memory if I use the /x option. Stephen M. Smith \ + / <smsmith@magnus. \+++++/ " #*&<-[89s]*(k#$@-_=//a2$]'+=.(2_&*%>,,@ acs.ohio-state. \ + / {7%*@,..":27g)-=,#*:.#,/6&1*.4-,l@#9:-) " edu> \ + / BTW, WYSInaWYG \ + / --witty.saying.ARC
w8sdz@rigel.acs.oakland.edu (Keith Petersen) (05/18/91)
Steven Smith argues that I was wrong about the BUFFERS with the /X option. In his MANIFEST display he shows how using the /X option frees up base memory. That is true. But look what happened to the NUMBER of buffers: BUFFERS=30/X. That isn't what you specified in your CONFIG.SYS, Roger. You specified 20. I am not talking about freeing up memory. I'm talking about the fact that disk caches work better when you set the DOS buffers to a small number. HyperDisk works best with the DOS buffers set to 5. Using the /X option in the BUFFERS command in CONFIG.SYS causes DOS to allocate 30 buffers NO MATTER HOW SMALL A NUMBER YOU SPECIFY. That spoils the performance of HyperDisk and probably most other disk cache programs. Keith - - - Keith Petersen Co-SysOp, Detroit Download Central 313-885-3956 (212/V22bis/HST/V32/V42bis) Internet: w8sdz@vela.acs.oakland.edu, w8sdz@eddie.mit.edu, w8sdz@brl.mil Uucp: uunet!umich!vela!w8sdz BITNET: w8sdz@OAKLAND
ralf+@cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown) (05/18/91)
In article <1991May17.172418.23832@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> smsmith@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Stephen M Smith) writes: }[CONFIG.SYS] } BUFFERS=20/x } }[Manifest] } BUFFERS=30/X 0CAE - 0CCA 0.5K Drive List } } Notice that with the /x option the Buffer list reads 0K memory! Yeah, but take another look at the Manifest report. When using the /X option, DOS allocates buffers in multiples of 30 in order to fill out 16K EMS pages as completely as possible (30 buffers at 532 bytes each leave 424 bytes unused). -- {backbone}!cs.cmu.edu!ralf ARPA: RALF@CS.CMU.EDU FIDO: Ralf Brown 1:129/53 BITnet: RALF%CS.CMU.EDU@CARNEGIE AT&Tnet: (412)268-3053 (school) FAX: ask DISCLAIMER? Did | It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's I claim something?| what we know that ain't so. --Will Rogers