On Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:59:00 -0400, Andrew Geoghegan wrote:
> I sucessfully configured arachne last month yet I am
> finding it has problems with some sites... I tried to load
> philly.techies.com and it took 1 1/2 hours to get an image
> to appear and it filled only part of arachne's window...
<snip>
> I can get this site okay after a shorter wait sticking to
> windows and running Netscape 4.0 ...
Due the nature of it's platform (Windows/*NIX), virtually
all inner parts of Netscape running concurrently at the same
time. Either "true" pre-emptive multitasking (Win 9x/NT/2K
and *NIX), or co-operative multitasking (Win 3.x).
The only part of Arachne that *emulate* Win 3.x's cooperative
multitasking is the image downloader. It's only a software
level round-robbin emulation, though. Like what you commonly
found in most 16-bit DOS games. Even though the CPU in use
has hardware support for multitasking (286s and up), Arachne
won't be able to use it, because it's run in 16-bit real mode
(native DOS) or VM-86 (Windows' DOS box).
Like another well-behaved DOS software, all other parts of
Arachne are single tasking by nature. This slows things down
when the process in charge has to wait for slow I/O device.
For example:
* Downloading and reloading multiple-framed site.
* Reloading too many images.
* Converting large JPGs and/or PNGs.
In this case, even a super-fast Pentium III would act like an
ordinary 486. That's why Arachne usually run faster on such
machine if loaded entirely in a large RAM drive... ;-)
IMHO, Arachne would be faster than Netscape in all aspect if
it were ported to Windows (read: 32-bit, Win 9x/NT/2K), or at
least Win 3.x (16-bit, runnable on 286s). But I seriously
doubt that Michael would do that even if he could... <g>
> [Arachne] I am using a 14k modem running at 19k...
<snip>
> [Netscape] ... through the same modem running at 57600
> baud...
BTW, why you can't use the same speed with Arachne? Is the
modem an RPI or Winmodem? ;-)
--Eko
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