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From: ejkst@cisunx.UUCP (Eric J. Kennedy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Binary loading times
Message-ID: <15043@cisunx.UUCP>
Date: 18 Jan 89 06:14:50 GMT
Reply-To: ejkst@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Eric J. Kennedy)
Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Comp & Info Sys
Lines: 25


I noticed some behavior that I thought rather odd today.  I have
AmigaSpice and Superbase Professional on my hard disk.  Spice takes up
445K on the disk and SbPro takes up 354K.  When I execute these
programs, however, spice loads in just over 3 seconds, while sbpro
takes over 13 seconds to load!  When spice loads, the hard disk light
stays on steadily, and I can hear the heads moving
"tick...tick...tick...".  When sbpro loads, the drive does its usual
flickering and seeking all over creation.

I can think of two possible explanations for this.  First, sbpro is
badly fragmented and spice isn't.  I don't buy this because sbpro was
installed during a restore to a virgin, reformated disk, while spice
was added after a few days of heavy use.  If anything should be
fragmented, it should be spice.  Second, is it possible that the spice
executable is one large hunk, while the sbpro executable has the usual
multiple small hunks?  This should load faster, but wouldn't load at
all if there wasn't a large enough contiguous piece of free ram.

Can anyone verify or oppose these guesses?  How can I tell if a file is
fragmented or how many hunks are in an executable?

-- 
Eric Kennedy
ejkst@cisunx.UUCP