How capable is A4000 online?

[Sandman]

Hi all,

My question, I have a A4000D w/WarpEngine-040,Picasso IV, RAM maxed out, all SCSI, etc.  I have just done a fresh install of OS3.9 along with AmigaSYS package.  Workbench feels relatively snappy but when connecting with my X-Surf to my cable router to get online... the internet is dog slow - I mean R-E-A-L-L-Y slow.  

I have tried both MiamiDX and Genesis(that came with OS3.9) and don't really see a difference.

Is it just the specs of my machine or does is sound like a bad install somewhere?

Thanks,
Tim

[Tumbleweed]

When you say slow - what websites are you looking at and what browser are you running?

I have a MKII Cyberstorm in my A4000D and it was reasonably quick on the web but it depends on the sites you visit. Amiga.org works well but other sites don't work very well or at all.

[Damion]

No, it should be reasonably quick for basic sites that work. I've found best performance with MiamiDX + MNI driver, but it sounds like a configuration problem. (IBrowse also needs to be registered and configured before it works optimally.)

 

[Sandman]

Actually I've tried the non-registered I-Browse (although I have a purchased key which I am unsure will work with newer versions but will try tonite)and A-Web (or what ever its called that came with OS3.9).

The only site other than Google that I've tried is this one.  Screen graphics pop up excruciatingly slow.

Also, what is this MNI driver and where is it available.

I am just using the SANA-II driver that the install defaults to.  A visit to the Individual Computers didn't shed to much light on the driver situation for me.

Thanks so much everybody!
Tim

[taunusand]

I think useing internet with my A4000 was slow when I had 040@25Mhz with 16mb ram.
060@50mhz + 128mb ram made a BIG difference!

I use Ibrowse 2.3.

040 is usefull, but not the fastest.
But I think a little more fast ram will make surfing the net a lot faster.

[alexh]

http://thalion.exotica.org.uk

I wrote this site originally on my Amiga and the resolution is still set for 640x512 screens. No Java script or any other stuff, just a few plugins that you'll never miss.

My Amiga config is very similar to yours except I have a 25MHz A3640 and a DKB3128 RAM card. Loading & Compositing is VERY slow when compared to a modern PC browser but WTF do you expect?

I'm not 100% uptodate on AmigaOS but does having the latest / fastest datatypes help with Browser rendering speed? Perhaps ones designed for RTG cards?

[mikrucio]

yeah guys seriously what ARE you expecting?
ANCIENT hardware = dog slow. Just remember how long the A1200 stock took to render a JPG photo. remember the screen scanning down as it was rendered...

[Bazzaq]

Is your warpengine040 a 28mhz or 40mhz..? i imagine the 28 would be sluggish.

[Damion]

Sandman wrote:

Also, what is this MNI driver and where is it available.

MNI = Miami Network Interface? (I think?) It's essentially some device drivers for certain cards that's optimized to work better with miami than the SANA-II equivalents (there are some specifics if you google, probably something in the miami docs as well). It made a *huge* difference with my Ariadne II... network performance was POS with the SANA-II driver, or using Genesis. Now it's simply fantastic.

It should be in the miami archive, I believe "z2-dp8390.mni" is the right one.

[Damion]

mikrucio wrote:
yeah guys seriously what ARE you expecting?
ANCIENT hardware = dog slow. Just remember how long the A1200 stock took to render a JPG photo. remember the screen scanning down as it was rendered...

Yes, obviously it will be sluggish, but I doubt he's expecting it to run like a quad-core. If it's totally unusable then there's some other problem.

 

[Jose]

I have a WarpEngine 40mhz verion and it's pretty fast loading from files for basic stuff. Never connected it to the internet directly though, suppose the traffic handling by the TCP stack will make it slower.

[countzero]

I have a 40Mhz Warp Engine too, and although it's slow, it's not that bad (a few seconds for each image ?) what is dog slow for you ? the thing that hits the most is Jpeg decoding.

[stefcep2]

up until 3years ago i used an A4000 with 68060 and CV 64 with high-speed serial port.  It was fast enough at the time, the limitation was the fact that i was on dial up and the web browsers eg Aweb and ibrowse lacked functionality.  the hardware itself was fine to render web page content such as jpgs, gifs, gif anims, frames. Certainly web page content has become more complex, but it sounds like its a network issue rather than the hardware being as incapable as  you are experiencing.

[Rebel-CD32]

Try changing these preferences in IBrowse. Open the Preferences, go to HTML, then Images. Copy these settings and see if it makes pages load any faster:

Use Fastmen for images: Yes
Play GIF animations: When window is active
Load images: All
Swap for JPEG decoder: "RAM:T/JPEGTMP/" or simply "JPEGTMP:" if you have it assigned to RAM:T/
Memory limit for JPEG decoder: Set this according to how much RAM you can spare. 2048K is my setting, but I have a slower Amiga.

Palette: Fast
Dithering: Off
Don't dither backgrounds: Yes
Progressive JPEGs: Yes

Use the Internal image decoding for all the image formats for now, and test the speed. If you have some good datatypes installed for JPEG, PNG, XBM and GIF, try the settings with External image decoding, and compare the speed. I'm still using AGA, so Internal Image Decoding is best for me, but it's possible your datatypes are faster than IBrowse, so try both settings.

There's not much else you can do to speed up the browsing experience other than going for a faster CPU. Try downloading some large files and see if the download speed is reasonable compared to the PC, then at least you'll know if the speed problem is network related or CPU related.

[Sandman]

Well I'm NOT expecting quad-core speed or anything near that, sheesh! :crazy:

What I consider 'Dog-Slow' would be pull up 'www.amiga.org', go make pot of coffee, walk to mailbox, get mail, come back, open mail, read mail.....home page not yet quite loaded.. Ok, I'm exagerrating a bit but it is really slow loading.:lol:

I know an old '040' old Amiga would be slow but.. :-?   I figured it must be sumthin else, hence the reason for my posting.

Thanks
Tim