(Excerpts from a message dated 11-18-99, John Angelico to Linda Proulx)

Hi Linda,

JA>I agree with everything but this one:
LA> 
LA>   > FCBS=16,8
LA>    Set this to "8,4"
LA> 

JA>Since this is for MS-PC-DOS v1.x support ONLY, I suggest that you
  >make it "2,2" which is the minimum possible.

    Nonsense.  Programmers of old DOS programs used FCBs long after DOS
1.x came out, even though the documentation told them not to (who reads
the docs?).  What to set FCBS= depends on which DOS programs you are
running, not what version of DOS they were written under (something you
have no way of knowing unless you wrote them ).

    Besides, an FCB uses about 36 bytes, so deleting some of them saves
so little memory space that it isn't worth the effort!  Such nonsense is
DOS-think at its worst.  I left my CONFIG.SYS entry at the default 16,8.

    There is another piece of OS/2 conventional wisdom floating around
(based on the same DOS-think) that says to severely cut the default
value in BUFFERS=90.  IIRC, each "buffer" uses 518 bytes, so the default
90 of them uses less than 46 KB.  The IBM Warp 3 performance white paper
(WARPPERF.ASC) says:

BUFFERS=90
        Buffers are physical memory used to support partial sector reads
        and writes in a FAT file system environment.  They are also used
        to cache FAT directory entries and for swap file disk I/O.
        Because BUFFERS are used to cache FAT directory entries, this
        number should not be reduced below 60, unless you are not using
        the FAT file system on your disks.  Reducing this number will
        increase the number of disk reads that are done to the FAT
        directory entries and therefore slow down your system.

    You have to remember that you have much more "conventional memory"
available under a VDM than you ever had under "real" DOS, and the rules
of thumb learned under many years of using DOS may no longer be
applicable.

    Regards,

        --Murray

___
 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * BASIC programmers never die, they just GOSUB and never
RETURN.

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