Is SFS really this slow?

[mingle]

Hi,

After battling for half a day with SFS, I finally managed to beat it into submission and get it installed on my HD partitions...

However, it seems to be very slow and also use a lot of RAM, which is an issue on my unexpanded A1200! When using SFS I only have 998KB free, whereas there's 1.6MB free when using FFS.

Here are the results of a few quick timing tests comparing SFS to FFS on the same system/identical partitions (all times in seconds):

              FFS    SFS
              ----   ----
Cold Boot     17.9   14.3
Warm Boot     17.4   14.0
Copy 2.8MB    32.5   49.7 (68 sub-dirs, 368 files)
Delete 2.8MB  11.7   99.8 (as above)

Apart from the reboot, it seemed (and also 'felt') noticeably slower than trusty old FFS...

I'd be interested to know if this is normal, or do I need to 'fine tune' SFS to get better performance?

Or am I simply wasting my time trying to use SFS on an unexpanded A1200?

Cheers,

Mike.

[itix]

Or am I simply wasting my time trying to use SFS on an unexpanded A1200?

I think you are. Since you are having only chip ram it does not make sense use disk caching or read ahead feature of SFS. FFS is better suited for small Amigas.

[pVC]

Remember that memory usage depends of block size and buffers defined. If you followed SFS docs, you probably have much bigger buffer settings on SFS than on FFS. With many partitions it takes much more mem. You might want to compromise it on system with less memory.

At least on better Amigas SFS is faster.. weird that delete is that slow... normally SFS deletes much faster than FFS...

[Tron2k2]

Have you tried to find one of those four or eight meg RAM expansions for the 1200, sometimes they even have an FPU and RTC on them.  Not much of an acceleration but at least having some fast RAM to DMA into should help the 1200 work a lot better.