Some MAY be interested, ALL should be interested. <G> I was trying to help Gil Parrish get his 20MHz '386 working respectably with Arachne. I know what kind of result is possible because I also have Arachne on a 20Mhz '386.
The project started with getting his HD speeded up, and things were NOT going well. In fact, his HD was twice as slow as mine using speedchk. To eliminate the HD itself from the equation, I suggested he run speedchk on his RAMdisk, and his results were again twice as slow as mine. http://www.hwcn.org/~ao773/myfiles/download/Clarences/speedchk.zip His words re: his OS: OK, this is setup I'm using. (Incidentally, the computer is dutifully running DR-DOS v7.02, which I understand is supposed to be good for ARACHNE.) His words: Run entirely on the RAMdisk (almost 2.7 meg free), and to within a second, all trials were 51 seconds to write, and 52 seconds to also clean up. My words: I'm VERY concerned about those times on the ramdisk. Something is very wrong. You said you had a 20Mhz '386 right ? Does it have a turbo switch ? It seems to be running at 10Mhz right now. his>> 386SX, 20MHZ. NO TURBO SWITCH. his>> CONFIG.SYS (Arachne-configured) has BUFFERS=20 and FILES=20. mine> Change that to Buffers=15 Files=30. That's what I use. his>> EXACT SAME RESULTS: 51 TO FINISH, 52 TO ALSO CLEAN UP. Since my box was running 22 sec and 23 sec I asked: > Would you try my software to see if it is a hardware problem ? He agreed, and here is his result: Gil> Well, I would have to agree my performance increased a wee bit. Gil> SPEEDCHK reported 23 seconds to write AND clean up on the RAMdisk. Gil> Maybe DR-DOS isn't all it's cracked up to be? * Maybe OSs written in "C" need to run on a Pentium ? <G> BTW, before I sent Gil the boot disk, I tried it on my DOS 5.0 P90 which usually takes 4 secs to run speedchk on the ramdisk. The boot disk uses IBM PCDOS 3.3 and it cut the P90 time to 2 seconds.<G> - Clarence Verge - Back to using Arachne V1.62 ....
