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From: FelineGrace@cup.portal.com (Dana B Bourgeois)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Stupid: What is FacII
Message-ID: <28344@cup.portal.com>
Date: 28 Mar 90 02:51:07 GMT
References: <SHEFFLER.90Mar27091900@colt.CS.CMU.EDU>
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 38

FaccII is a program that buffers floppy disk accesses.  That means that
as your program reads from the disk, a copy of what is read is kept in
memory so that if you need to refer to it again, it is there.  So it 
can be read much faster than going to the disk again.  In practice set
FaccII to the largest size you can live with.  On my 1.5 meg system, I
have FaccII set to 256K.  Up to 256K of stuff is kept by FaccII buffers
in fast RAM making it appear programs run much faster.  BAtch files are
big winners with a floppy system and FaccII because normally every time
you need to 'echo' a line (for example) the echo program has to be read
into memory from the disk and executed.  If you read it from the disk
once then the next time you need it there is a good chance it will still
be in the buffer memory so you read it from RAM instead.  

The best thing is to have everything always in RAM of course.  That is
impractical in almost every case.  So a RAM disk can help, or making a
program Resident.  But you still need LOTS of RAM for a RAM Disk to be
a general purpose solution and the Resident command means you have to 
decide what to make REsident.  Not everything can be Resident and 
sometimes you don't want it always in memory.  Just maybe for three 
uses in a row.  The Buffer idea is that by keeping a copy of what you
have called from disk recently, there is a good chance of your needing
it again.  If not, eventually it will be replaced by something else you
read from disk recently.  And the best part is that it all happens 
without any decisions on your part - you don't even know it happens
unless you notice things are a bit faster and the disk drive doesn't
get used as often.

Course if you have a hard disk then you might not want to use FaccII
since it uses precious RAM.  Or you might want to make the buffer
sizes pretty small.  Reading from a hard disk is nearly as fast as
reading from the RAM buffer so it is your call.

I run a three floppy system and the software that has made the biggest
difference in ease-of-use over a plain vanilla 1.3 system:

Conman, WShell, FaccII, DMouse, MyMenu, PowerPacker.

Dana Bourgeois @ Cup.Portal.Com