Hi all,
after several tests I found the reason for this strange behaviour.
It disappeared when I booted from a virtual diskette without fdconfig / fdauto.bat and executed watcom.exe. Same from HD.
Then I added fdconfig again - it was still fast.
Finally I found out that line (in about 62) caused be brake.
"lh fdapm apmdos"
This command appears three times in the autoexec.bat (lines 40, 62, 76, maybe it varies a little) and is used there depending on the machine types.
Putting the command "lh fdapm apmdos" to "rem" made the watcom.exe installation file work as it should.
 
I asked Eric Auer, he recommended tests without "lh" - or  replacing apmdos by the softer "fdapm ADV:REG" but this gave the same slow
speed I had before.
 
So I wonder if it is really necessary to install energy saving in FreeDOS live CD, or, at least to check where
the machine runs (bare metal or vm which needs more engergy at all).
 
Willi
 
 
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2023 at 2:30 PM
From: wilhelm.spi...@mnet-online.de
To: "Technical discussion and questions for FreeDOS developers." <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Freedos-devel] Open Watcom v2 DOS installer is abysmally slow in FreeDOS

I am no programmer, but I can test things like this for clarification:
I downloaded open-watcom-2_0-c-dos.exe (an extracting .exe) at:
https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/releases/tag/Current-build
140 MB size.
First I extracted it with Windows, it contains 4,018 files, and has a size of
335 MB extracted (.exe extracted with 7zip). The extraction with Win needed
in about one minute (I assume less).

Installing FreeDOS and watcom 1.9 delivered with FreeDOS 2303 on virtualbox (installed with fdimples) needed in about one minute
for installation and in about one minute for deinstallation. Copying / deleting files from iso to virtual HD was extremely fast.

FreeDOS 2303 on 2 GB virtualbox vdi had 32 MB RAM, 1,738 GB free space.

I copied open watcom2 (see above) into the same 2GB vdi in virtualbox.
Installing open-watcom-2_0-c-dos.exe (140 MB) in virtualbox with FD 2303 really
needs much longer. But from my sight it is not astonishing as it has to extract
in about 4000 files from this .exe file. Needed time: 58 minutes, result: 4018 files, 335 MB

I increased the RAM to 256 MB (everything else unchanged). 20% of installation
were done in 10 minutes --> in about 50 minutes. stopped at 10 minutes.

Additionally I added "install=lbacache buf 20" in fdconfig.sys. (of course I checked if it was really installed!)

20% of installation were done in 10 minutes --> in about 50 minutes. stopped at 10 minutes.

At last I ran it from an MS product "7.1" on the same machine with a .vdi and a
.vhd image. The whole installation (4,018 files, 335 MB) was REALLY done in
three or four minutes.

No idea why FreeDOS is so slow with extraction, but it seems to be not the debt of the .exe file.

Willi

 

 
That depends.

whatever 'depends'.
 
Besides poorly optimized system caches, is the
installer doing things that blow the cache and increase the miss rate?

whatever the installer is doing: unless you find a valid 'this is
doing something in a stupid way' point this installer is as much a
valid benchmark point as any other. Possibly not the most relevant,
but still...

 
 You noted a significantly increased download zip.  Is everything
actually necessary?  Did you download a debug build that will have
additional binary code or is the download zip an optimized build?

in what way this is related to 'FreeDOS install speed is slow' escapes
me.

Tom



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