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From: leonardr@svc.portal.com (Leonard Rosenthol)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Don't post stuff using stuffit
Message-ID: <1990Dec31.201634.27364@svc.portal.com>
Date: 31 Dec 90 20:16:34 GMT
References: <40105@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <1990Dec28.110336@hari.Viewlogic.COM> <1990Dec30.221035.16112@cs.umn.edu> <5185@husc6.harvard.edu>
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Reply-To: leonardr@svc.portal.com (Leonard Rosenthol)
Organization: Software Ventures Corporation.
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In article <5185@husc6.harvard.edu>, kenh@hscfsas1.harvard.edu (Ken Hancock)
writes:
> I too was amazed at this and actually found it to be true.  It's actually
> not too surprising when you sit there and watch your hard disk's access
> light constantly flicker.  When I ran StuffIt Deluxe on an 8 meg
> IIfx (finder only), I was appalled by the speed.  The intelligent
> thing to do would be to create one large input buffer and one large
> output buffer to lessen disk access.  
	Stuffit Deluxe 2.0 improves on this (and other stuff), but if you
want to see REAL disk access, look at Compactor.  I once did some testing
on a PLI External RAMDisk and you should have seen the disk activity of 
Compactor, and because the disk was fast(!) it got better times than on a
regular HD.

> Otherwise, I guess I'll have to switch to Compactor -- written by
> someone who appears to be much more competant than the folks at
> Aladdin.
> 
	That's not entirely fair, Ken.  Version 1.0 of Stuffit Deluxe had
other priorities than speed at the time it was being written - they were
concentrating on offering features which made compression & archiving easier
and more convient - the viewers, optimizers and scripting for example.  Users
have found these to be quite useful, but the biggest request for 2.0 was
Speed - and so it has been addressed!
	Remember that there is more to compression utilities, or any program
for that matter, than just speed.  A program may take a bit longer to compress
a file, but it may also take me less time to start the compression process
as it is easier to work with!  If speed were the only issue, we would all
be using CRAYs and COS (blech!)
--
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+ Leonard Rosenthol              | Internet: leonardr@sv.portal.com  +
+ Software Ventures              | GEnie:    MACgician               +
+ MicroPhone II Development Team | AOL:      MACgician1              +
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