Hi folks.
1. BACKGROUND
You may be aware that I have had comm's problems at > 9600bps when
receiving web pages from my ISP (very fast responses from ISP, which
Arachne seems inclined to miss/ignore). Other internet applications
(including Windoze 3.11+ IE ;-) work fine on the same hardware ...
You may also be aware that I believe this effect is responsible for the
very poor performance some people get in VESA video mode, since
this effect seems much worse in VESA mode. BTW, has anyone else
verified this on an affected PC, by setting the baud rate to 9600bps
(and getting much *better* performance than at higher baud rates!)?
2. FINDINGS (SOLUTION!)
After trying various things, I have found that setting the FIFO receive
interrupt threshold to 1 (epppd sets this to 8, according to the doc's),
comm's works like a charm!!! Nice and fast, with packet driver stat's
reporting zero errors and zero dropped packets (on bad pages, I was
previously getting about 10 receive errors and 18 dropped packets,
when loading a 20-25K page).
So, can anybody think of a *good* reason why the FIFO receive
interrupt threshold should be set to 8??? I know this theoretically
reduces the comm's overhead a bit, but in practice, this seems to
be the cause of poor comm's performance (I know I am not the
only one to have this trouble!).
I understand than Bernie is rewriting "epppd(d)" to reduce it's memory
needs (just out of curiosity, how is this going to be achieved?). So,
I would like to propose that this change to the FIFO receive interrupt
threshold also be implemented. Any thoughts on this ... ?
Best regards,
Joe.
