Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!cbmvax!daveh From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Amiga competitiveness Message-ID: <14821@cbmvax.commodore.com> Date: 2 Oct 90 22:17:53 GMT References: <90271.190320UH2@psuvm.psu.edu> <420@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA Lines: 46 In article <420@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> cjeffery@cs.arizona.edu (Clinton Jeffery) writes: >Example #2: an Amiga's hard disk, even with FFS, is *ridiculously* slow > compared to the _identical_ hard disk running DOS or UNIX/386. This > is based on empirical observation doing heavy C compiles on a 2000 > with 1MB ram and a 40 Meg ST-251-1. Sorry. I wish it were untrue. You obviously have something wrong with your hard disk setup. Ok, well, some people would say that a 40 Meg ST-251-1 IS something wrong in the first place, but I won't go picking on Segate again. And I doubt you'll find too many identical '386 setups to compare it too; the number of '386 systems running SCSI or ST-506 is just slightly larger than the number of Amigas running EDSI (eg, 0). ST-506 and EDSI have problems of interleave setup, not usually a problem with SCSI, that result in factor of 10 or more preformance changes. I have yet to use any machine, even our pretty fast MIPS based UNIX system (which of course also has a bit of loading on it other than me) that does compiles faster than my Amiga 2500/30 systems with Quantum 80 drives. Except the new Amigs 3000 I have here. It is true that, in general, you'll have more include files to process on an Amiga than a PC, since the PC doesn't have any real operating system to worry about supporting, unless you include Windows or something. Same goes for UNIX without X, etc. Precompiled system header files can help equalize this situation. I usually have my makefile create the precompiled header for me, and place it on the RAM: disk for extra speed (not recommended on a 1 meg system). And if memory permits, setting your C compiler as a resident module, possible under both Manx and SAS, will cause all phases of the compiler to be available instantly for more speed, rather than being loaded from disk (and heck, loading a 100K compiler pass from hard disk must take at least 0.1 seconds on this here 3000....). It's impossible to know just what you have working against you. Could be the disk interleave. Could be it's not really formatted FFS. Could be you have some PD background utility that's busy waiting (don't laugh, I ran into a guy with disk speed problems on PLINK that had this very problem). But with a well tuned Amiga setup, it's difficult to force the system to be as slow as most PC or UNIX systems. The top end '386/'486 systems with hardware disk cache tend to keep up pretty well with the A2000.... >| Clint Jeffery, U. of Arizona Dept. of Computer Science -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: hazy BIX: hazy Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold -REM