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From: forrest@orion.sybase.com (Jon Forrest)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: How to Use Borland's VROOM Technology with a RAMDISK?
Message-ID: <12089@sybase.sybase.com>
Date: 12 Dec 90 21:53:28 GMT
References: <11984@sybase.sybase.com> <12990003@hplsla.HP.COM>
Sender: news@Sybase.COM
Organization: Sybase, Inc.
Lines: 48

In article <12990003@hplsla.HP.COM> davels@hplsla.HP.COM (Dave L Sherrer) writes:
>
>With almost 7 megs of expanded memory, why would you want to swap to a ram
>disk. Quattro Pro checks whether you have expanded memory and will use it.
>Surely, this would be preferable over swapping (I know, I know, it doesn't
>answer your question ...)

(I'm the person who started this topic.)

After several enlightening mail messages, and some reflection, I now
realize that there were two fundemendal problems here. They are:

1. My stupidity. Of course QPRO couldn't swap to expanded memory because
it didn't see enough free expanded memory since, as I had said, I had
allocated 6 megs of expanded memory to the PC-KWIK disk cache. The
amount of free expanded memory left over wasn't enough for QPRO to
assume it could swap to expanded memory. I did fool around with
changing the amount of free expanded memory, and also with using the
/x flag to use extended memory, and things worked better.

2. Borland's lack of forethought. Even after I realized my mistake
I still thought it should be possible to tell VROOM to swap to a
specific disk, maybe by using an environment variable. So, I looked
all through my documentation, found nothing about how to do this,
and then called Borland. It turns out there is no way to do this.
(If someone knows how please let me know.)

I was a little disappointed at Borland Tech Support. At first the
guy I talked to gave me some jive about how disk cache's shouldn't
be used because they don't cause writes to actually appear on a disk.
I pointed out that most, if not all, of the popular disk cache programs
today have write through caching and that, in any case, this should
be something that the user should decide to live with. He also didn't
seem to appreciate how useful it would be to be able to tell VROOM
where to swap. But, these aren't major complaints and at least Borland
isn't fooling around with 900 number tech support.

So, the moral of this story is that even if you do have a RAMDISK
you can't get VROOM to use it unless you start your VROOM based program
from the RAMDISK.

----
Anything you read here is my opinion and in no way represents Sybase, Inc.

Jon Forrest WB6EDM
forrest@sybase.com
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415-596-3422