Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Calling MoreMasters
Message-ID: <3561@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 9 Dec 87 08:44:40 GMT
References: <1987Dec7.094745.599@mntgfx.mentor.com>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, TOPS Division, Berkeley
Lines: 25
Keywords: memory masters handles

In article <1987Dec7.094745.599@mntgfx.mentor.com> tomc@mntgfx.mentor.com (Tom Carstensen) writes:
>What is a good guideline as to how many times you should
>call MoreMasters?  I've seen some programs call it
>about 10 times, others 7 - is there better documentation
>on the ROM call then that of Inside Mac?

See Mac Technical Note #53, the penultimate paragraph.  (Remember, you
really can't do serious Mac programming without the tech notes.)  Briefly,
remove all your calls to MoreMasters, then bang the heck out of your
program, doing just about everything as much as it can be done.  Then use
MacsBug or TMON to view the heap and count blocks of size $108, as well as
$10c and $110.  These are the master pointer blocks.  Call MoreMasters that
many times plus 20% at the start of your program.

My favorite part of this tech note is the ultimate paragraph.  "This is a
simple strategy for handling MoreMasters.  The prgram ResEdit uses a far
more sophisticated approach, allocating master pointer blocks dynamically.
That technique will be the subject of a future Technical Note."

Tech Note #53 is from my birthday (Oct 28) in 1985; no such tech note has
appeared yet, more than two years later.  Perhaps in time for the first
68,000,000-based Mac....
-- 
Tim Maroney, {ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)