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Re: Proper memory switches for E/D 199q8 w/ 8M of physical RAM?



>>>>> "Larry" == Larry Velez <lev1673@is2.nyu.edu> writes:

    Larry> I have tried: -memory 8M -applzone -6M -syszone 2M
    Larry> -applzone 4.5 -syszone 2M -applzone 4M -applzone 4.5M
    Larry> -applzone 8M -applzone 5M

    Larry> These were all used with and with out -oldtimer and
    Larry> -nosound.  They all seemed to slow Executor down.  I know
    Larry> some of these don't make sense, I was just trying to narrow
    Larry> it down to the best setting with no luck.

If you're running under Win95, keep in mind that Win95 is going to
need a lot of memory for itself.  When you tell Executor to use more
memory than is physically available, it needs to use virtual memory
and that slows it down.

"executor -info" will tell you how much free memory Executor detects
and how much it decides to use.  In general, Executor tries to choose
a sensible default memory setting.  However, tweaking the defaults can
certainly help (especially if you have a lot of memory).

    Larry> Also I am thinking of upgrading my 486/50/8M soon and am
    Larry> trying to decide between a fast (100,120,133)Mhz Pentium
    Larry> motherboard with my current 8 Megs of Ram or a not so fast
    Larry> (75,90)Mhz Pentium mb and uping the Ram to maybe 12 or 16
    Larry> Megs. Does Executor benefit more from increased Ram or
    Larry> processor speed?

It depends on what you are doing.  Even a blazing processor will be
brought to its knees if it's paging to disk all the time.  OTOH, if
Executor can fit in RAM then you want as fast a processor as possible.

    Larry> Is E/D's code optimized for the pentium chip?

There are a few pieces of Executor here and there (mostly in the
graphics code) that are optimized for the Pentium.  Overall, though,
it's not, because gcc (the C compiler we're using) doesn't know how to
optimize for the Pentium.  [Intel's version of gcc that can optimize
for the Pentium has some nasty bugs].

The key CPU feature that Executor takes advantage of is the "bswap"
instruction which was introduced in the 80486 (and of course exists in
the later processors).  Executor doesn't use any Pentium-specific
features (although we may use Intel's MMX multimedia extensions in the
Q4 '96 Pentiums eventually).

-Mat


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