Hello All;
I wrote this last week and didn't post it cuz the list was down.
It appears that no one is interested, but I wanted to close the books on
this matter with a few test results.
.........................................................................
TSX is a lot like Arachne in that it is really beautiful and I do love it.
It is a million times more friendly than Linux.
It is QUITE configurable. It gets along with and adds to DOS. It works.
And I will never use it, except as a toy.
Because it was written in "C" it is large and runs at creeping speed.:(
I thought that the 50% running speed I seemed to be noticing might be due
to the fact that the "lite" version was a two user system, and TSX was only
giving me 50% of its attention. I tried to find a variable to change to
assure me 100% duty cycle as a single user without success.
Then I tried two tests that proved to me that the speed problem wasn't due
to a fixed time division among two potential users.
First, I learned how to create a ramisk with TSX.
Then I loaded speedchk onto the ramdisk and ran the test on my P90 at home
followed by a similar test at my office.
Check out these numbers:
P90 Ramdisk + TSX 4.26: Speedchk 21 sec, cleanup 1sec.
P90 Ramdisk + DOS 6.20: Speedchk 3 sec, cleanup 0sec.
33Mhz'486 Ramdisk + TSX 4.26: Speedchk 48 sec, cleanup 2sec.
33Mhz'486 Ramdisk + DOS 3.30: Speedchk 7 sec, cleanup 0sec.
Straight DOS3.3 on a 33Mhz'486 is 3 times faster than TSX on a 90Mhz pentium.
In both cases, straight DOS was 7 times faster than TSX. That's even worse
than the typical factor of 3 between ASM and "C".
On the chance that maybe TSX would work better on a less disk intensive task,
I checked the time required to unzip disk 1 of the TSX610 distribution from
floppy drive A: with my 33 Mhz '486. It took 58 seconds.
Then I did the same test with TSX on that '486.
Unfortunately, I fell asleep and missed the finish. :(
So I re-wrote my unzip.bat to include a timer and did it again with TSX.
It took 9 minutes and 32 seconds.
Another beautiful idea ruined by implementation in "C".
- Clarence Verge
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