At 10:09 �� 8/2/2002 +0100, you wrote:
>>>Why exactly do slave blocks prohibit high speed data streaming? I still >>>do not understand. >>> >>>Arnould >> >>Well I don't remember exactly what the problem is... > > > >Then how can you write the slave blocks are a problem? > >I would like to understand exactly why they are a problem. > >Arnould Well at startup SMS (and QDOS) start allocating space for Slave blocks in order to access faster files that are constantly being used. Upon the end of the operation, this space is not returned to the OS though. This technique works well with Microdrives and floppies, but when you come to huge files that are needed for MM then you are effectively sc**ed ! Just imagine my animation. 27 Megs on a 16 megs machine... Since slave blocking allocates ALL of the free space to files every file that's been read once is "stored" there... when this is full... oh well! It's easy to fill slave blocks with large streams of data. After that access becomes slow as a snail... not to mention free memory goes out the window (At least I think that's how it works) Phoebus
