Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!jalbert
From: jalbert@cs.ubc.ca (Francois Jalbert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Program Execution Probe
Summary: Any available?
Message-ID: <5945@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 11 Dec 89 09:01:22 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca
Reply-To: jalbert@cs.ubc.ca (Francois Jalbert)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 17

Hi there. I am considering buying a 4Mb extended memory card for my AT. I
would use it as a huge RAM disk from which I could run PC-TeX. I hope to
speed up things since using LaTeX involves reading and writing so many
files. However, I would like to evaluate during a typical PC-TeX run, how
much time is spent doing disk operations or internal operations. This would
give me an idea of how much speed improvement should be expected. Of course,
I would rather do that before buying a card and the memory chips. Is there
such an utility available from somewhere? I browsed through SIMTEL but 
didn't see anything applicable. I have a pretty good idea how to write in
assembly such an utility. Just monitor all the disk related interrupts and
add up the total time spent there. One could increase the frequency at
which the timer_tick interrupt is called to improve the resolution. And
also make sure the frequency at which the original timer_tick routines are
called is left unchanged. I just know it will take me a day to come up
with the beast, I'd rather avoid it. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks
in advance. Francois
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