Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!mimsy!oddjob!gargoyle!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!fornax!jl From: jl@fornax.uucp (JL) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Hard Drive dir problem Message-ID: <340@fornax.uucp> Date: Mon, 13-Jul-87 10:28:55 EDT Article-I.D.: fornax.340 Posted: Mon Jul 13 10:28:55 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 15-Jul-87 01:12:20 EDT References: <3774@garfield.UUCP> <7083@shemp.UCLA.EDU> <494@amc.UUCP> Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada Lines: 57 > In article <3774@garfield.UUCP> robert4@garfield.UUCP writes: > > [ Question about why the FIRST acces to a directory after a cold boot results in the hard drive being accessed continuously for about 5-10 seconds BEFORE the dir listing comes up on the screen.] > In article Jon Mandrell, Applied Microsystems Corp., (ihnp4!uw-beaver!tikal!amc!jon) > My system does the same thing, and after poking around I tracked it down > to the BUFFERS= entry in CONFIG.SYS. It turns out that some clusters are > getting buffered in memory, so that the next time you access the directory > it just looks in memory. On mine, I can enter an invalid command, and the > disk will whir and I will get an error message, and then if I do it again, > it comes back immediately with an error message. > > P.S. If you really want to speed up operations (with a fast hard disk), and > you can afford the memory, set your buffers to a larger number (I use *********************************** > 64, and have been tempted to go larger). RTFM. :-) For example, try pages 4-7 through 4-10 of the IBM PC-DOS reference manual for ver 3.20 In particular, note the suggestion above about using very large buffers. I quote the following from page 4-9 of the above cited reference. "For most data base applications, a value between 10 and 20 buffers usually provides the best results. For subdirectories, between 10 and 25 buffers usually provides desirable performance. Beyond that point, the system may appear to start RUNNING SLOWER [caps are mine]. With a very large number of buffers, it can take DOS longer to search all the buffers for a record than it would take to read the record from disk." ... "Since each additional buffer increases the resident size of DOS by 528 bytes, the amount of memory available to the application is reduced by that amount. Additional buffers may actually cause some applications to run more slowly because there is less memory available for the application to keep data. This could result in more frequent reads and writes than would otherwise be necessary." Please keep this in mind when you select a BUFFERS size. -- Jay-El