Hi Michael, All;
Last night I visited slashdot.org with Arachne 1.62 and got a BIG shock.
I wanted to read the Douglas Adams interview and the rehash. See here:
http://slashdot.org/interviews/00/06/21/1217242.shtml
I had no special complaints about the download - it was 284k - but I wanted
to read it OFFline cuz it was a bit long.
On my P90 - with 16Mb memory and no ramdrive - it took 3 *MINUTES* and 13 Sec
to reload from cache. I repeated the operation a few times with <- and ->.
The disk cache is reported to be 2Mb. (Smartdrv). The OS is DOS 6.22.
Totally stunned, I went to the same site ON THE SAME HARDWARE with Netscape
on Windows 3.11 - same HD, same disk cache.
Netscape 3.04 reload from cache (Arachne chat to slashdot) 14 *Seconds*.
Netscape 2.02 same everything as above - reload from cache 12 *Seconds*.
Today I retried the experiment on my office machine: 33Mhz '486 with 8Mb
ram and PC-Cache 800Kb HD cache. DOS 3.3 + Win3.11 when necessary.
Netscape 2.02 on Hard Disk as above, reload from cache was 65 *Seconds*
Arachne 1.62 on RAM DISK - download time 3:04 reload time 1 Min 39 Sec.
Not bad.
Arachne 1.64 as above, QDAT No, reload from same cache 1 Min 37 Sec.
Two seconds better because no intermediate paint job.
Here is the REAL interesting stuff:
Copied cache to HD and adjusted cache.idx to point properly.
Set arachne.cfg to point cache to the HD, Cache2TEMP=Yes
Arachne 1.64 reload from HD cache: 1 Min 37 Sec !
Set Cache2TEMP No and reloaded: 1 Min 36 Sec !
Flushed PC-Cache and reloaded: 1 Min 37 Sec !
Only 1 sec to load up PC-Cache I guess. :-))
What's this mean ? You better have a good and *WORKING* disk cache.
I will put PC-Cache on my P90 tonite.(temporarily - need Smartdrv for testing)
I have a Cache and buffer optimizing test program that allows comparisons
between Hard disk and Ramdisk.
The program completes the test in 6 seconds on my ramdisk and with the
800kb PC-Cache (15 buffers) the Hard Disk test takes 38 Seconds.
But this is 132 random files - not ONE file that fits completely in cache.
Hope that was interesting.
- Clarence Verge
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