Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!pacbell.com!tandem!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Files larger than available memory. Message-ID: <1990Oct7.032409.22928@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 7 Oct 90 03:24:09 GMT References: <1990Sep24.101616.20657@psuecl.bitnet> <14893@cbmvax.commodore.com> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 27 lron@easy.HIAM (Dwight Hubbard) writes: [lots of other good thoughts from several folks omitted:] >Exactly, but wouldn't it be better to work on getting AmigaDos applications to >run under the new version of Unix. It does have virtual memory and has been >mentioned before virtual memory and real time performance just don't go >together on a 68000. Envision an editor that defaults to a 60KByte edit buffer, but goes into software virtual memory mode for larger files, and which I can control to open the memory buffer to a couple of megabytes if it is available and not needed to satisfy contention from background processes. Now I have great performance on small files, pretty good performance on big files, and, while things may slow down a lot, it is still _possible_ to edit any file I can fit a copy of into my available hard drive space. It is that quality of still being possible to edit large files that makes the effort to install software virtual memory worthwhile. The situation I mentioned a week back in this thread, of editing a 3.5MByte file, was done on a fast MS-DOS box and a fast disk, and while a global substitution might take 20 seconds, going to a particular line in the file never took more than two. It is certainly possible for a clever programmer to make the performance acceptable for a particular task by careful design and tuning, and if the same cleverness is then isolated into a library, it is there for all programmers to use. Kent, the man from xanth.