NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/dcom/modems-part2/11039

Text File | 1996-08-05 | 2.7 KB | 56 lines

Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems
Path: news.uunet.ca!gts!bokonon!stephen
From: [e-mail] (Stephen M. Dunn)
Subject: Re: Overrun errors -- needing a solution
Organization: United System Solutions Inc.
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 21:28:37 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]>

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Albert J. Batista Jr.) writes:
$As I ran these tests, I noticed that Disk accessing was very limited in
$Quicklink Gold, compared to Netscape, which accesses the hard drive almost
$anytime you want to pull a web page from the 'net...

   Netscape likes to cache pages so that they'll display much quicker
if you visit them again.  Its cache directory tends to become very
large and inefficient (DOS searches directories in linear order) ...

   Netscape also likes to cache pages in memory.  Add that to the
size of the programs you're running and it's possible that you may
be having swapping taking place with Netscape, depending on what
you have running and how much memory you have.  Perhaps Quicklink
Gold is small enough that it doesn't swap?

$He has 8MB currently, and Virtual memory is set to 19MB (was set to 24MB
$but I reduced it via 19MB windows recommended; Windows 3.1 being used with
$the COMM.DRV communications driver)

   If you have access to a replacement for COMM.DRV, try it.  Many
modems include fax/modem software, and that software sometimes includes
a replacement driver (WinFax, for example, will ask if you wish to
replace the standard driver with its own).

$So, I figure that if he were to increase his "chip" memory to, let's say,
$12MB or 16MB, that should reduce the disk drive accessing done by Windows
$to use virtual memory,

   No.  Windows doesn't do more swapping just for fun because you have
more virtual memory; it swaps when it needs to.  If you're swapping
with 19 MB of virtual memory, you'll swap with 12, 16, or 150 MB
of virtual memory.

   If he's swapping, then the real solution is to add memory.

   One other thing you may wish to consider is that SMARTDRV
can have a tendency to keep interrupts disabled while doing its
hard drive accesses.  Of course, it's also of significant benefit
as a disk cache.  Try disabling write cache, or disabling SMARTDRV
entirely, and see if that makes a difference.  This may be a
case of trading one evil for another.
--
[e-mail]               ...!{xrtll,gts.org}!bokonon!stephen
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen M. Dunn, CNE, ACE, Sr. Systems Analyst, United System Solutions Inc.
104 Carnforth Road, Toronto, ON, Canada M4A 2K7          [phone] x251