🚀 go-pugleaf

rfranken@mcs213d.cs.umr.edu (Richard Brett Frankenberger) writes:

>In article <rdempste.9.722354510@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za> rdempste@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za (Rob Dempster) writes:
>>I am currently in the process of considering migrating to Windows 3.1
>>I am running Windows 3.1 on a 25Mhz 80486SX with 8 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard
>>disk. I have a 2 MB SMARTDRV disk cache running and this makes the software
>>that I run from the hard drive very snappy. Unfortunately I also have to pull
>>some applications of a Novell LAN server and this really slows things down.
>>I have tried some fixes such as putting my Borland C include files on the
>>local hard drive. I would have put the library files there as well but don't 
>>have the space. So at the moment it seems that I will have to get a larger 
>>drive or find a driver similar to SMARTDRV that works with Novell file 
>>server drives? I would be most interested to hear whether such a driver 
>>exists or alternatively any other advice that would be useful.
> 

>I doubt you'll have too much luck, though -- First, most disk caches cache at
>the cluster level.  There is no such thing on server drives - they are
>strictly file oriented - not block oriented (i.e. there is no such thing as an
>INT 25 call on a server drive - where caching frequently takes place) ... so
>it would require more than eliminating the check that locks out network drives 
>in SMARTDRV.EXE - it would have to be redesigned to cache at the file level.
> 
>Also (although this shouldn't preclude a network cache - there are lots of other
>programs that can be dangerous if used incorrectly), caching some network
>drives would be harmful (i.e. a drive containing a database file that is
>being continually updated by many users - how would file locks work - you
>lock a record, then I go to read it - I shouldn't be able to do so, but I am
>because its in my cache, so the server never gets asked) - but programs
>(such as C or whatever) that aren't being changed should be able to be cached.
>
You can specify in your shell.cfg or net.cfg to have some cache buffers set.
These are 512 byte buffers.  You should use multiples of 8 or 16 because of
the block sizes used by Netware(2.xx and 3.xx respectively).  

cache buffers = ???

This doesn't cache shareable files and I don't know how much benefit it will give.  That depends on what you are running.

Ken
 
--
Ken Lam                                                     (803)-884-7615 (H)
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