🚀 go-pugleaf

On my MS-DOS system, my path has about 10 entries.  On my Amiga
system, my path has about 10 entries.  About the same number of files
are searched, yet the Amiga does less seeks to the disk.  (Diskbuffers
flushed, of course).  Why is this?  Because the Amiga is doing O(N)
seeks with hashing; but the MS-DOS does O(N*M/Z) searches.

(N = number of directories; M= number of files per directory; Z =
number of directory entries per sector)

It balances out and the Amiga wins.  Also, the Amiga's FFS caches
side-sector and directory information better than MS-DOS.  I've been
told that FFS is modeled after the Berkeley Fast File System and has
been benchmarked to be the fastest FS when judged with similar
hardware.

Why do you think MicroSoft is pushing their "new" high-performance
file system for OS/2.  There is a LOT of room for improvement over
MS-DOS.

This has been debated over and over here on comp.sys.amiga.

It comes down to this (IMHO); when searching 1 directory for a couple
files, sure, MS-DOS FS is a win.  But when you are dealing with lots
of files, FFS is the winner.  Remember, a bubble sort can be faster
than a QuickSort if you have a very small number of items.  A bubble
sort re-written in tight-coded assembler is still O(N^2) and is still
a bubble sort.

[ Insert favorite computer scientist vs. engineer joke here :-) ]

-Tom
-- 
 Tom Limoncelli -- limonce@pilot.njin.net -- tlimonce@drunivac.bitnet
 rutgers!njin!tlimonce -- Drew University, Madison, NJ -- 201-408-5389