Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!imagen!atari!momenta!tecot
From: tecot@momenta.com (Ed Tecot)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: Two Questions about System 7
Message-ID: <1991Feb27.195901.18056@momenta.com>
Date: 27 Feb 91 19:59:01 GMT
References: <1492@quintus.UUCP>
Organization: Momenta Corporation
Lines: 32

johnt@quintus.UUCP (John Grant) writes:
>i)	Is there some suitable way of dealing with temporary files ?  What
>	I am looking for is some automated way of dealing with them so that
>	should a program terminate in some unfortunate manner, you
>	don't slowly consume all available disk space with dead temporary
>	files. Users of Word, Fullwrite etc etc would appreciate this - the
>	need for "helper" inits would then be avoided.
>	Better would be a method whereby the temporary files would stay
>	around during one reboot, so that the user might be able to
>	recover any data from them before the files are deleted on the 
>	next reboot.  It strikes me that this functionality would be easy
>	and inexpensive to implement.

The Folder Manager has a temporary folder that is periodically sweeped of
all closed files.

>ii)	I have heard that an, albeit small, RAM cache cannot be disabled.  I 
>	would like someone to explain why we are *forced* to use this in a
>	synchronous I/O environment - this 32K (?) is probably already
>	implemented in the drive controller as a track cache, so why
>	duplicate this functionality - doesn't this also hurt the
>	performance of those NUBUS SCSI controllers with all the RAM ?

The minimum RAM cache is now 16K.  Note that the RAM cache does things that
track caches typically don't, such as caching volume and directory
information which wouldn't be on the same track as your file.  Also, the
RAM cache replaces the ROM cache (RAM refers to where the cache code lives,
not the cache), which used 12K in the system heap.  Finally, the B*Tree
Manager and the RAM cache share code; so supporting both methods of
caching would result in significantly more work.

						_emt