To: Bill Davidson <bdavidson AT ra DOT isisnet DOT com>
Cc: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>,
        djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Ramdrive 
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 95 13:24:43 +0200
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>

> Ok, if you didn't see my latest post, go32 reported 1400Kb and info 
> reported 1768 Kb.  How can this be?  How the f*** should I know?! I just 
> started using this package!  Could the difference between total extended 
> memory and extended+conventional memory be it?

I don't think so, topline should only report the physical RAM
available to go32, i.e. only extended RAM.  I will check this.
If I *am* right, then this might be the cause of your crashes
(go32 thinks it has more RAM it really has).  Do you also see
this phenomenon (topline shows more RAM than go32 prints) when
RAMDRIVE.SYS is not loaded?

> Point taken, and that seems to be my only choice at this point.  I might 
> add that the DJGPP docs and readmes are a bit divergent on this point; 
> some reccommend the use of a ramdrive, some don't.  However, in trying to 
> make things work I have noticed that the ramdrive provides marginal 
> improvements (especially under C++, which seems to instantiate the word 
> "glacial").  It's just that some of the files (including, I think, the 
> FAQ... I'll check that) suggest using a ramdrive, and I tried using 
> Microsoft RAMDRIVE.SYS which comes with MSDOS, and it crashes.  Sure, I 

I suspect that part of DJGPP docs started a long time ago, when disk
caches weren't so efficient.  Your measurement of the relatively
low gain when working with RAMDRIVE is consistent with what I've
seen.  I think the revised FAQ (for which I am responsible) doesn't
recommend RAMDRIVE too warmly, but I'll check that.  Anyhow, for
low-memory systems such as yours (no offence) loading RAM disk is
a luxury you can't afford.  I suspect that's why your C++ compiles
are so painfully slow.  C++ is a memory hog: it takes about 2-2.5MB
for even small source files; for large files you better have 4MB
of free extended RAM, or else it starts paging.

Btw, if you only started to use DJGPP, I would suggest reading the
draft of the revised FAQ.  It could save you some grief (I hope so;
tell me how it did if you read it).  It can be found as
ftp://omnigate.clarkson.edu:/pub/msdos/djgpp/pub/djgppfaq.zip.  If
you have trouble accessing omnigate, I can mail it to you (~100KB).

> Incidentally, I still use an old mono monitor and Hercules compatible 
> video.  I notice that all refernces to video are to VGA.  Could this be a 
> problem? (But if so, what the heck has RAMDRIVE got to do with it?)

I don't think it is the problem, because Info only uses text mode,
where VGA isn't much more than MDA.
Maybe it's something in your CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT.  How about
memory managers?  But then, if you already decided to toss RAMDRIVE
and this solves your problems completely, then enough of the
permutation fatigue...