Roy J. Tellason wrote in a message to Will Honea:
RT> I can lose the tcp/ip stuff,  no problem.  I'm also looking 
RT> around with some thoughts about what I might be able to 
RT> trade up to,  since I have a number of 386 boards here.
 WH> I think the real question has been answered over and over in 
 WH> the last 4-5 years:  until you get enough memory that you have 
 WH> essentially NO swap activity - not empty, just little or no 
 WH> activity - the speed (power) of the processor comes in a 
 WH> distant second for improving performance.  A PII-333 with 8 meg 
 WH> would still be a dog - altho it would be a very Hot Dog......
 RJT> Yeah,  I kind of figured that ram was the answer...   :-(
RAM helps, but I ran a 486/33 for years with OS/2 2.1 and 3.0 with 8 megs and 
it was definitly NOT a dog.  My HD seldom to never "Thrashed" and I ran HPFS 
and FAT drives, Full WPS, a SB16 and TCP/IP on WARP 3.  There are no "tricks" 
to running in 8 megs, just need a properly working and configured system, and 
stay away from RAM hogging applications.  
What should happen with an 8 meg system, is IF you overcommit your ram, you 
will swap once when you load an application.  Once it is loaded, in 99% of 
cases, the app will run exactly as it would if you had 512 megs of ram.  OS/2 
and DOS text applications seldom use lots of RAM, and I always had 6-10 
applications opened with little disk swapping, and no thrashing.  Running a 
PIG, like Borland C++ would cause swapping, but ran about the same once 
loaded.  I now run 20 megs on the same machine, and while better, it is not 
very noticible unless I run RAM intensive apps, such as my C compiler and GUI 
apps.  
What are your cache settings for HPFS/FAT?  I find most people in small (and 
large for that matter) memory machines have WAY too big a cache for OS/2.
The quickest and easiest way to screw up an 8 meg system is wasting ram on a 
large cache.  
I recommend you run CFGINFO4.ZIP and apply most of the settings he recommends 
for your system.  
BTW, in my system, I noticed a bigger performace improvement when I added a 
new faster HD than I did when I added 12 megs of ram.  Renumbering my message 
bases for example, went immediatly from 9-10 minutes to 3-4 minutes for 1500 
*.msg's.  
Remember, I ran my exact same 8 meg system under DV for 2 years before 
upgrading to OS/2, and most every area, performance either stayed the same or 
improved.  
 WH> Seriously, an 8 meg machine with anything more than maybe 
 WH> (preferably not) the WPS running is about as much fun as 
 WH> practice bleeding.  Same with the main machine:  I was amazed 
 WH> at what 32 meg vs 16 did.
I've heard this said many times by many people, but my experience is not 
CLOSE to this.  If you are set up correctly, and running mostly DOS and OS/2 
TEXT applications, 8 megs is very good, if not great.  Disk thrashing shoul 
NOT occur, and if it does, something is wrong.  If you are hearing your HD 
"ticking" every few seconds, and things are dead slow, something is wrong.  
I've had that happen on rare occasions and never did figure out what caused 
it, but it was very unusual.  I don't recall that happening since going to 
WARP a few years ago, but it may have stopped when I went to 20 megs... it's 
been awhile.
 RJT> I forget now what it was that I did change,  but it was some
 RJT> of the other stuff you suggested...
I made lots of tweaks to my system over the years, and when I got around to 
looking at CFGINFo4.ZIP, He had most everything that I had done as 
recommendations.  I think we both got our info from the same sources, right 
here on FIDO.  I might add that none of the "tweaks" I put in from the 
default set up changed any thing dramatically.
                                              Jack 
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