Faster directory listing possible?

[ChaosLord]

Using Directory Opus is an excellent idea!

The other thing you should do is use PFS3 as it is very much faster than SFS at reading dirs and at the same time it uses less CPU power which means there is more cpu power available to poll that silly gawdawful IDE HD interface.

Another thing you can do to speed things up is switch to a quality SCSI DMA HD interface.

Another thing you can do is to buy a faster accelerator.


But really if you just switch to PFS3 + Directory Opus your dirs will be lightning fast.

Workbench is simply not coded for speed.   The underlying AmigaOS is fast but the Workbench.exe is sloooow.

[ChaosLord]

PFS3AIO version from Aminet is recommended by Toni Wilen, coder of WinUAE.

Everyone in Team Chaos (except me) has been using PFS3 for many many years and they all swear by it.  Most of them tried SFS vs PFS3 and only then did they choose PFS, that was many years ago.

I have read the results of many timing tests performed by many different ppl over the years.  PFS3 FTW!

[ChaosLord]

You are showing a CyberVision 64 so check that your sys:prefs/Workbench prefs have the gadget "Images in: Other Memory" selected.

+1

That will speed things up a lot.  Workbench is coded the slowest way possible so it always stores gfx in the slowest memory possible, which is just the wrong way to do things on AGA or on accelerated Amigas.

That with PeterK's icon.library will greatly accelerate icons. The 68060 version of PFS is much faster than alternative file systems for listing as mentioned.

There is a special version of PFS3 for 060?  Awesome!

060 FTW!

[ChaosLord]

Workbench is coded in the most compatible way possible with settings and utilities to speed up and enhance the appearance.

I don't entirely agree with this.

If he opens his window with thousands of icons then Workbench will completely thrash the memory list and there will be thousands of memory fragments and the Amiga will be permanently slower from that point on.  If he opens and closes that window multiple times and then runs random software he is in for a crash.  Its like Workbench doesn't use memory pools at all and just bashes the OS with zillionz of malloc()/free().

I very strongly suggest that djkoelkast download TLSFmem from Aminet and install it near the top of the startup-sequence.  This will dramatically reduce the memory fragmentation and dramatically increase the speed of the Amiga and dramatically lengthen the uptime.

TLSFmem is the best utility for Amiga ever.  It greatly improves the speed of any program that performs a lot of memory allocations.

[ChaosLord]

What does TLSFmem that reduces the load?

TLSFmem helps to prevent memory fragmentation.

Once your memory becomes fragmented then any time a program allocates memory or frees memory it then takes 100x longer or 1000x longer or 10000x longer or memory allocations FAIL completely.

It happens to everyone's computer on every OS.  That is why after running certain programs your 3Ghz computer starts running at the speed of a 50Mhz Amiga.  It has happened to me countless times.  It can be triggered by a certain flash ad or by opening a certain PDF.  PDF viewers were quite notorious for fraggling your memory on Windoze for many years.

I have had the same problem as the original poster many times.  I accidentally open a dir with Workbench that has a zillion icons and my Amiga becomes functionally unusable after that because my memory is so badly fragmented that it is totally impossible to allocate any large chunks of memory even though my memory is nearly empty.  It doesn't matter how empty your memory is.  If it is all fragmented it is completely useless.

If you are like me and you leave your computer running 24/7/365 then TLSFmem greatly speeds up your Amiga after a few days of use and greatly lengthens the uptime.

[ChaosLord]

Have you tried installing any type of device caching software?  Single block reads (which are common when parsing the directory) is extremely slow with flash card type devices.

Hey that is a very good point!  When reading from a flash device the device can only read whole blocks at a time right?  And 1 block of that drive is probably like 1MB, right?  Even if it is only 512K that is still going to be really tremendously slow for that crummy IDE v1.0 interface that Mehdi Ali stuck us with.

SCSI 4ever!

[ChaosLord]

Because of how Workbench loads icons, it has to talk to icon.library, and the programming interfaces of icon.library are just not up to snuff in terms of efficiency. For example, icon.library performs its own memory management and tracking.

This has to account both for image data and the rest. This is something which you cannot easily switch over to memory pools. For example, you would have to have a separate pool for each Workbench window in order to make pool management more efficient.

The way I figured it, if Workbench used its own pool and PeterK's icon.library used its own pool then that could double the speed and/or reduce memory fragmentation by 10.  Or something like that

I assume this is why PeterK's icon.library is so much faster (+ all the other optimizations he did.)

[ChaosLord]

I can honestly say I've never knowingly had a memory fragmentation problem, or any apparent slowdown due to memory fragmentation. Then again though, I've always used PoolMem!

Of course I used to use PoolMem too!  From the day it first came out I was using PoolMem and it was awesome!

But then TLSFmem came out which is 10x better than PoolMem.

I ran software that is very hard on the Amiga's memory system.  It creates megabajilion of memory fragments.  And TLSFmem was massively better than PoolMem.  It uses a new better algorithm.

You can always comment out PoolMem with a ; and then add in TLSFmem in place of it in your startup-sequence to see what I mean.  If u don't like it you can always switch back.

[ChaosLord]

I always "just assumed" that the reason PFS3 was so fast was because it essentially had a secret built-in copy of FastCache.

Is that not true in some sense?

Everyone has told me that PFS3 uses a large chunk of RAM that FFS does not use.   All that extra ram is used to cache stuff, right?  Or ?

Does anyone know if FastCache works with FFS when I use 4K or 8K or 16K sectors?

Ppl always complain about FFS being slow but if you increase the sector size to 4K or larger you get a giant speedboost.  No caching software needed.  If you then add caching software you should then be around the same speed as SFS or PFS.

[ChaosLord]

Ok, what are we using to bench mark this with?  I think FastCache is faster - I am using an A3000 w/40MHz 040 w/80MB of RAM and an A1200 with 50MHz 030 w/256MB of RAM.  The A1200 has the stock hard drive and a 8GB CF drive.

All I can say is this reviewer used DiskSpeed 4.2 in July 1993 to race FastCache vs. PowerCache.  So if you use that exact version of that program then you can compare your own results to those of the reviewer.
http://de4.aminet.net/docs/rview/FastCache.txt

In 1997 both FastCache and PowerCache were updated:
FastCache 1.1 1997 http://aminet.net/package/disk/cache/fcache11

And if you really want to figure out the best one there is also HyperCache Professional (commercial) and Dynamicache (commercial).

[ChaosLord]

Install FastCache and see if you can get it down to 10 secs.  You'll hafta make sure to set the settings to use FASTram and use a reasonably large cache.

[ChaosLord]

Yep, I tried TLSFmem a couple of years ago, and I have a newish version on my hard drive which I downloaded earlier this year. I did try it, but I couldn't tell whether it was any better than PoolMem or not. But if everyone on here says it is, then I'll have to take your word for it. The whole world can't be wrong. I may install it for good yet... LOL.

Thanks Chaos...

I still have my PoolMem in my startup-sequence too.  But it is commented out.  I have not uncommented it in years.

I am a software developer and there is some sort of hardcore debugging tool that I sometimes have to run (I can't remember which one... its been years since I did something silly like code a bug .  Anyway this debugging tool hacks into the AmigaOS memory list system.  Only TLSFmem doesn't USE that system which is why it is so much faster and less fraggly.  So when running that hardcore debug tool I hafta switch back to PoolMem temporarily.

So like I say, ur not getting married to TLSFmem, or if u r then u can still cheat on the side with PoolMem when u get the urge.

[ChaosLord]

How?

  http://aminet.net/package/disk/cache/fcache11

FastCache Free Software + instructions are there.  I think it might actually default to FASTram nowadays so that u don't hafta actually configure anything.

[ChaosLord]

I have addbuffers Work: 1000 on my 32MB FFS A1200

1000 buffers = 512k

Addbuffers does speed things up noticeably.

But it is not as dramatic as FastCache or PowerCache or etc.

[ChaosLord]

Are you able to use more than one CF drive (I use MicroDrives, essentially the same, but it's really a hard drive in stead of flash memory)? I can only use one at a time, I really need both of them to work together.

What is it that is stopping you from using more than one "CF Drive" at a time?

AmigaOS supports a lot of drives.

The only way something could "stop you" from using multiple drives would be... a screwey hard drive controller?  Or a screwey driver?  Or ?


Addbuffers works with everything automatically without any problems.  I believe FastCache also works with everything automatically without any problems.