Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!imagen!atari!apratt
From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Answer to "what does CACHEnnn do?"
Message-ID: <2821@atari.UUCP>
Date: 1 Feb 91 02:29:23 GMT
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 25

carter@cat34.cs.wisc.edu (Gregory Carter) writes:
>I don't even know of [a disk accelerator] that does, except Atari's really 
>absurd cache program, which doesn't work worth a dam.

You might not understand what CACHEnnn does.  If you think it is supposed
to do something that it doesn't do, you will think it does it badly.

Try this: without running CACHEnnn say "show info" on a disk (floppy or
hard). Now say it again.  Took a while, right?  Had to hit the disk both
times, right?

Now run CACHEnnn (with nnn at least 020) and and do it again. The second
time you "show info," the disk isn't accessed, because the information is
in memory already.  That's an example of what CACHEnnn does.

(This demonstration won't work with a write-protected floppy, because the
second "show info" will actually read the disk to detect media change.)

CACHEnnn doesn't do much good on a machine with TOS older than 1.4 because
those versions used the cache badly: adding more buffers to a badly managed
cache doesn't help.  But STe's have TOS 1.6 or 1.62, so that's not an issue.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt