Hello Michael and all interested in '386s; Last nite I compared Arachne 1.50b2 and 1.60b1 on my home computer. It is a 20Mhz '386 with only 4Mb ram. I use an ATI VGAWONDER XL that converts EGA to Hercules (with 16 step grayscale) to drive my flat screen, paper white TTL monitor. I am effectively using EGA. The 4Mb ram limits me severely. Arachne is useless on the hardrive on this computer so I MUST use it on a ramdrive. The memory manager is QEMM 5.12 and the DOS is 3.30. (Still wish I had 3.31 - is Zenith abandoned ??) I use vdisk to create a 2,312kb ramdrive and Stacker doubles it to 4.587Mb. This is a bit of a lie, because it can't get good compression on exe files and Stacker won't let me make a cluster size smaller than 4kb. This results in a LOT of waste when loading all those little files Arachne uses. Norton says I have 10% slack in the root, 19% in \system and 46% slack in \ikons. The remaining XMS memory is divided into 512kb diskcache and 256 kb XMS. I think I should swap that division. There is 603552 bytes of low memory available before starting Arachne. Temp is on the ramdrive, cache, mail and download are on the harddrive, and Cache2TEMP is Yes. FastJPEGS is No, Multitasking is On, and Images are *ON*. The only remaining details that might be of interest are the loaded size and diskspace left for TEMP. With ALL *.gif, ALL WIZ*.*, ALL *.acf, ALL network stuff deleted, and a little more pruning, the loaded ramdisk (Arachne 1.6b1) WITH Command.com has 3,035,136 bytes used and 1,552,384 bytes free. Actually only 1/2 that in REAL bytes free due to the compression estimate. The modem is 33600 and was used at that rate at 0700 GMT. Times are seconds. Arachne version: 1.50b2 1.60b1 Connect and LOAD home.arachne.cz 51 Sec 48 Sec RELOAD (CACHED) 22 Sec 17 Sec REFRESH (F9) 9 Sec 7 Sec Page END 6 Sec 6 Sec Connect and LOAD quote.yahoo.com 26 Sec 21 Sec RELOAD (CACHED) 17 Sec 12 Sec NNC.to (chart) 33 Sec 24 Sec Page DOWN to view 6 Sec 7 Sec Connect and LOAD egghead.com 178 Sec (2:58) 212 Sec (3:42) Link and LOAD Computer Products 631 Sec (10:31) 685 Sec (11:25) RELOAD (CACHED) 129 Sec (2:09) 191 Sec (3:11) DOS MEMORY online 93 [?] 79 [?] MEMORY after altH 117 [+] 103 [+] It's pretty easy to see here why testing should be done with a '386. A MAJOR portion of ALL times above is due to slow LOCAL processing. Arache version 1.6b1 STILL links client side images and verifies images TWICE on a re-load. Doing this once only would cut a whole MINUTE off off the above reload times for the Computer Products page. It seems to me that version 1.60b1 is SLOWER on local operations. I hope this is information of some value to someone. - Clarence Verge -- - Help stamp out FATWARE. As a start visit: http://home.arachne.cz/ --
