I don't doubt that for 286 machines, this routine may indeed be the main problem with Arachne's speed, therefore it should be improved (I presume you know how to do this? ... ;-). For me, the thing that makes Arachne slow, is that it is very disk-intensive. This is mainly due to the manner in which Arachne invokes, and communicates with, supporting programs such as DJPEG32, etc. This will be somewhat mitigated (corrected) by using a disk-cache, which may be able to hold such supporting programs in memory, so that they can be invoked (ie. start up) quickly. As for communication between these programs and the core program, this is done via file I/O, which may not be helped as much by using a disk-cache, _if_ the I/O file is only loaded (needed) _once_ by the core program. Significant speed improvements could therefore be made, if such communication between the core and it's supporting programs did not involve file I/O. The core program too, appears to do a lot of file I/O, where it _seems_ to write temporary stuff to disk, then read it back a bit latter - if EMS/XMS could be used to a greater extent, again, this would speed things up. Finally, Arachne seems to do a surprising amount of disk writing, when doing fairly "simple" tasks, such as exiting (this is evident, from the effect of enabling and disabling disk _write_ caching, on speed, when you perform such tasks). Anyway, for what they're worth, these are my observations about Arachne's speed (and behaviour) ... Regards, Joe. > -----Original Message----- > From: Jimis [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Thursday, 16 November 2000 7:35 > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Arachne can be even faster!!! > > Hello everyone. > > I don't know if anyone has noticed but there are some things that could > be reprogrammed in arachne and make it work much faster. > In particular, I believe that the routine that prints fonts to screen is > not optimized. Since I work in a 286 machine, many imperfections are > visible to me 'cause they are not covered by processor speed. > > What I mean is that other graphics programs that use the same screen > resolution (like Windoze or DosShell in graphics mode) print characters > to screen really fast, only a bit slower than in text mode. But arachne > is really slow and most times I can see the text being printed slowly. > > It would be a could idea to write an optimized WriteFontToScreen routine > since a lot of speed can be earned for two reasons: > i) It is one of the most often used routines in the arachne program > ii) The current routine used is REALLY slow and can be MUCH better. > > Jimis > > > > -- This mail was written by user of Arachne, the Ultimate Internet Client > -- Arachne V1.66, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
