Clarence wrote:
>I'm about to come to the conclusion that my Quantum Prodrive 105 (LP105A)
>is a piece of crap. My tendency to jump in this direction is supported by
>a visit to the Quantum website, which is DEFINITELY crap - they use 100%
>javascript. It's so bad it crashes Netscape. :((
You judge the quality of the HD on the homepage of the company? Now that
would be rough for many companies ;-)
>Bernie ?
Yes?
> Here is the lookahead stuff. I leave the block size at 1k and
>set the lookahead to MAXIMUM (62k).
>Speedchk says: 26,27 Sec. Arachne load Inbox 13 Sec. RELOAD INBOX 12 Sec.
>
>We are allowed to set the lookahead to zero, so I did.
>Speedchk says 24,24. Arachne loads inbox in 10 Sec. Reloads in 6 Sec.<g>
I can understand a diffrence between the various sizes. This diffrence lies
in the ammount of useless data that's in RAM, getting to the useful part
would take a little longer if you need to to jump in RAM (this assumes that
a cache in CPU and/or on the motherboard also uses read-ahead, let me know
when this gets too complicated <G>).
Now the question is if all the 400 files in your mail directory end up in
the cache, with a small sized cache (you only have ca 1.3MB for it) the
time may increase.
1,3M/400 = 3 250 bytes/mail. Could you increase your cache size somewhat
(so you get all of the files into the cache) and try again?
However there are too many variables in use here for any of us to be able
to give a clear answer. The things I can think of right now are:
1. CPU type
2. RAM type
3. Motherboard/CPU cache size and type
4. HD cache size (and HD type, a SCSI drive will use less CPU - and so will
UDMA drives)
5. Cache size
6. Read-ahead size
However in my experience the larger cache you can afford the larger the
chances are that you will be able to reuse a part of it. The chances are of
course that searching will slow your system down, but if you can afford the
max available (known to me anyway) at ca 36.5MB then you probably have
enough horse power to pull the searches off.
Since I don't use Arachne for e-mail I don't know how the system will
behave with larger/smaller read-ahead files. I merely use the max to get
the majority of my files loaded faster. Or atleast that's the impression I
get, but a K6-2 400 is perhaps not good enough to test with?
As a side note my 386 (that I'm about to toss out BTW, I might even get rid
of the last 486 here as well soon) is very slow on HD access (even with a
farely large SmartDrive cache) so that's a diffrence as well.
//Bernie
