Elvis Hargrove wrote in a message to David Calafrancesco:

-> You have seen me talk about that in the past. It has to do with the
-> swap file, the session settings for the DOS sessions and other
-> things.

 EH> I'd sure like to know more about that!  I already learned
 EH> some stuff from what you told the Lady.....  Where can we
 EH> find such info?   (Or is it something that has to be learned
 EH> via experience?)

It took several years to learn it all but there are more FAQs and such
available these days than there were back then. 

 EH> Having a nice quick hard drive sounds like it would be
 EH> important for the swapfile facet of it. Nes ce pas?

OK... some quick basics, you saw the stuff for optimizing the DOS session
settings. Don't forget to use SIO, add the ",-" paramater to allow the COMM
ports to share between your DOS and OS2 sessions. Make sure that the DOS
session that accesses a particular COMM port doesn't have access to any other
port. The ket to the swap file is to place it on the most used partition of
the least used drive always choosing HPFS over FAT for the swap file. The next 
biggest thing is to ensure that the swap file starts 25% larger than you have
ever seen it grow. I use a guideline of 64mb as a minimum and will expand from 
there if needed. 

My current system I have finally dropped the swap down to default but it also
has 128mb of RAM (usually it has 196mb but I stopped using HPFS386 recently
and don't need that much RAM anymore). 

The most important thing I can suggest is to keep the system updated at a
decent fixpack level and to ensure that the subsystems are also updated and to 
never under any circumstances leave Netscape up and running overnight. Shut it 
down when you are not actually using it or it's memory leaks will blow the
system out of the water. I know that mine has that problem still. 

Basic config.sys tweaking is best done following the suggestions in the
various config.sys FAQs or optimizing programs. Simple things like if you
don't have any FAT drives in the system rem the diskcache line. If you do have 
FAT drives change the diskcache to use a fixed amount of RAM or else it grabs
circa 25% of system RAM depending on how much memory you have. Set the maxwait 
to 1 as running a BBS you want every task to have the same shot at processor
time. 

I would web out to www.os2ss.com and check some of the tweaking and optimizing 
web pages linked there as they do a far better job of covering everthing. 

Dave Calafrancesco, Team OS/2
dave@drakkar.org

... They got the library at Alexandria, they're not getting mine! 
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