On 9 Aug 2005 at 22:17, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > Darcy James Argue schrieb: > > Hi Chuck, > > > > I believe it now works in the background, which I agree is a > > terrific improvement. > > No, it doesn't work in the background, it's just faster. Only today > Speedy lost some of my notes while it was autosaving. > > I am pretty sure it is faster because Finale uses less temporary files > and instead stores more in RAM. No big magic here, just a side effect, > really. > > Nice nonetheless, although true background autosaving would be much > better. I have never understood why it needs to display the autosave > message on top of everything else on the Mac, even when Finale is in > the background this message sits on top of everything else.
Well, disk writes in every OS I've ever heard of have the highest priority of any external device. Now, it could be that a file writing operation could be serialized as several small scale partial writes, with the ability for the CPU to do other things in between. There's no reason why this could not be so, and implemented at the OS level as an API. Perhaps there's an old non-interruptable file save API and a newer one that works asynchronously and can allow other operations to continue in the foreground. Are Windows users seeing the same improvement in Autosave? If so, it would tend to suggest that the improvement is largely because the process is somehow faster (perhaps because in the old system, data had to be read from multiple files and written into a single file, where in the new system, it's read from RAM into the single file; that would mean that the slowdown in the old system was the reading of the data from the temp files), rather than because of a change in the file I/O. I'm completely clueless about these kinds of low-level APIs on Windows -- I always leave that kind of thing up to the OS to handle, so I don't know if there's an option to use synchronous or asynchronous disk writing APIs. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
