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From: steele@unc.cs.unc.edu (Oliver Steele)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Possible LSC improvements
Message-ID: <1629@unc.cs.unc.edu>
Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 20:49:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.1629
Posted: Wed Oct 14 20:49:50 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 16-Oct-87 06:44:58 EDT
References: <2071@sfsup.UUCP| <170026@acf3.NYU.EDU>
Reply-To: steele@unc.UUCP (Oliver Steele)
Organization: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 37

mms@gpu.utcs.UUCP (John J. Chew III) writes:
>In article <21246@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) writes:
>> In article <1987Oct9.001743.14846@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> mms@gpu.utcs.UUCP (John J. Chew III) writes:
>> >I'd like to be able to put my header files on a small ramdisk, as reading
>> >them in seems to be the most time-consuming part of my compiles
>> 
>> Why bother? Just crank up the RAM Cache on the control panel and you get
>> better than the same effect: the include files that are getting used a lot
>> right now, stay in the cache, and you don't have to worry about explicitly
>> moving files around.
>
>It's no trouble to move the files, since I can tell the ram disk
>program to do that automatically, and if I run LSC with a reasonable
>amount of space under switcher there doesn't seem to be enough memory
>left over to make the cache effective.

I don't understand this last bit:  if you reserve x amount of memory, you
aren't going to be able to use it for anything else whether you've
reserved it for a RAM disk or for a cache.  Are you talking about the RAM
cache built into the later system files, as Mr. Oster is, or about some
third party software that reserves memory dynamically?

In any case, the advantage of a cache over a RAM disk is that you
probably won't need to load every include file for most projects, so you
can get the same time savings with less memory for a cache since it loads
only the applicable files, and dynamically changes its file selection if
you move to another project.

Curiously, I've found that if you only have one drive, this use
(compiling files) is the *only* one for which a cache is superior

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oliver Steele				  ...!{decvax,ihnp4}!mcnc!unc!steele
							steele%unc@mcnc.org

	"'As it were' means 'I think that I sound very erudite.'
	 'Per se' is Latin for 'as it were.'  As it were."