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From: ali@polya.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Massive Fragmentation with PopCLI & SetFont
Message-ID: <2118@polya.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 8 Mar 88 09:56:00 GMT
Reply-To: ali@polya.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 40

[]
If I have the following two statements in my startup-sequence:

popcli
setfont pearl 9 -s -r

And I let my machine sit after rebooting until popcli blanks the screen,
my chip memory is massively fragmented. We're talking:

   BEFORE: Max Chip 397K, largest 396K
   AFTER:  Max Chip SAME, largest 1300 bytes

This problem was first occuring with a full startup-sequence (with
Conman .99B, Facc II with 512K of buffers, 1 Meg VD0:, and various other
stuff), and it took me a while to localize it to the above two statements.
The problem will occur even if the above two are the only two statements
in the startup-sequence file and I do absolutely nothing else.

This is on 1000 with 2.5 Megs of memory. By the way, I should note that
the problem did *not* occur with Topaz 11, but did occur with ruby 8...
And it did occur with many different configs --- VD0: mounted, filled, no VD0:,
with most of fast mem filled, etc. By the way, sometimes the fragmentation
will not occur for a long while (if the PopCLI doesn't get the chance to
blank out the screen). But, even hours later, as soon as PopCLI does it's
job, >blam<, you're left with tiny chunks of memory.

I believe setfont is the latest version (2.0?), and PopCLI is version III.
I haven't hit this problem without PopCLI (but I didn't really try very hard).
I was going to try Tom's PopCLI ("Mackie"), except all my copies were at the
office for some reason (Murphy's Law). I should also mention that while
I was playing around with (large) fonts a couple of months ago (for TeXF,
which never appeared on comp.sources by the way, sigh), I often encountered
massive CHIP memory fragmentation. I always blamed it on my program (which
was still buggy). But it seems like there's something wrong with 
OpenDiskFont().

Any words of wisdom will be appreciated. I will post more info if I 
discover more specifics. 

Ali Ozer, ali@polya.stanford.edu