🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, I have a few more observations about MicroEmacs 3.9-and-a-quarter.
I just tried to load a large file (the Stevie editor sources from
comp.os.minix, all in one file), and I had some real problems.  I tried
first to load the file into MicroEmacs 3.9 1/4 launched from the Gulam
with my 391K ramdisk and could not.  "Well fine", I thought, "I'm pushing
it a bit here. :-)"  So I decided to turf the ramdisk and get some numbers.

First, booting my 1 Meg ST normally with no ramdisk and my normal desk
accessories and AUTO programs left me with 870046 bytes free according
to SCHIZO.  MicroEmacs 3.9 1/4 reported that after it had loaded with no
files that it had 736574 bytes available.  But it was unable to load my
361409 byte file; it was only able to load 232785 bytes into the buffer
before complaining that it had run out of memory.  That's not very good
in my books; where did the memory go?  It may have been spent lavishly,
but it seems more likely that the memory was just fragmented by that time.

By contrast, running the Gulam shell from the same 870046 byte baseline
resulted in free space from within the editor of 775942 bytes.  Gulam
loaded the file easily, with 215730 left over for other buffers.  And
with the 391K ramdisk, Gulam failed, but could fit in just a bit more 
of the file than MicroEmacs 3.9 1/4 could!

The difference in overhead is very interesting to me; having 361K taking
up 543K of memory is a whole lot better than having 233K taking up 737K
of memory!  Anybody have any comments about what is going on here?  And
can MicroEmacs 3.9 1/4 be fixed?  I don't regularly edit files that big,
but I do like to edit as many 50-90K USENET news batches as I can stuff
in, and for that, it looks like I have to use Gulam.  Of course, that's
not such a bad way of doing things, either.
-- 
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"There was something fishy about the butler.  I think he was a |
 Pisces, probably working for scale."   - Nick Danger          |
Robert Thurlow              uunet-----\                        |
Vancouver, BC, Canada                  !van-bc!rthurlow        |
In the heart of Kitsilano   ubc-cs----/                        |
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