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From: DeadHead@cup.portal.com (Bruce M Ong)
Newsgroups: alt.fax,comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: FAX in a Sun environment
Message-ID: <33605@cup.portal.com>
Date: 7 Sep 90 01:04:03 GMT
References: <15658@know.pws.bull.com> <33571@cup.portal.com>
  <15675@know.pws.bull.com>
Distribution: na
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 45

>
>>	Another weird problem with MSDOS based file system for these fax
>>cards (not just gamma link's) running real time, is that if you are sending 
>>a file that is in a directory with A LOT of files, searching thru the FAT 
>>table will take sometimes minutes, and opening of files, etc. slows down 
>>tremendouisly. 
>
>minutes?!?!?  i'm crossposting this to comp.sys.ibm.pc.  were you
>running on a 4.77 Mhz XT with a very big disk drive?  is this FAT
>access problem something you saw on hard disks as well as floppies?
>
>the FAT access on big DOS disks does slow things down a bit, as i've
>seen similar problems on multichannel (4-6 channels) PC-AT DOS-based
>voice mail systems.  but the FAT access latencies i've seen in this
>situation are on the order of .5 or 1 second at max -- not many
>seconds.  so, i'm wondering about the cause of the problem you
>described.  any ideas, yall?
>
	guess I should clear thing up a bit :). The environment was a 25
mhz 386, running DesqView with a process creating 7000 files in a directory 
3 levels down from the root, each file 1000 bytes long. At the end when it got 
to about 6500 files, it got painfully slow. I think it took teh system more
than 12 hours  to do the task. Why would I want to do such a deranged thing?
I was trying to prove to somebody who wanted to run two GammFax GFDCP 
processes under desqview that it would not work. I will spare the net with
the rest of the gory details...

>
>> And there are the serial fax 
>>modems - but the software they supply all run under DOS, and we still dont 
>>have a standard way of communicating with these serial fax modems.
>
>ah, but we do -- it just hasn't been implemented by most
>serial-fax-device manufacturers.  check with Datarace -- they were all
>over the creation of the serial-fax standard.  naturally, i can't
>recall the standard name.  something like EIA229/TRsomething.
>(really helpful, eh?)
>
	Why do I have a feeling that this standard will be met by the
fax modem community with resounding silence... just like the one from intel...

>/*  eli@pws.bull.com   617 932 5598   fax 508 294 0101  */

/bruce
deadhead@cup.portal.com