Speed of uport/386 L2.2 and DOS/MERGE 386

[Keld J|rn Simonsen]

I have done some small testings of speed of DOS applications
running clean DOS 3.2 and under Microport System V-L2.2
with DOS/MERGE. In the IO test I copy a file of
500 kb, that is 1 Mb in total. I get these results:

Clean DOS      COPY                   8 sec
DOS/MERGE      COPY   E: -> E:       16 sec
DOS/MERGE      COPY   E: -> C:       20 sec
UNIX           cp                    13 sec
UNIX           dd bs=8k              12 sec

I also ran a simple GWBASIC program (20 a=a+1 if a<60000 goto 20)
and got this:
Clean DOS      GWBASIC               27 sec
DOS/MERGE      GWBASIC               38 sec

All tests run on a NCR PC 916 with 2 Mb RAM.

Well these are simple tests not showing all aspects of DOS/MERGE.
But the figures are reflected in our application program SPSS/PC
which is about double the time to complete under DOS/MERGE 
compared to clean DOS. SPSS is quite IO intensive, so I reckon
that's why I have half the speed. Also I figure that the reason
why clean unix (cp,dd) is slower is because of the UNIX file system
buffer size, which is 1k compared to DOS' 4k.

My users resist running DOS/MERGE as it is so much slower.
So what can I do to make it go faster ?
Will microport provide a faster file system, a la 4.2 BSD ?

Keld Simonsen, U of Copenhagen   keld at dkuug.dk ..mcvax!dkuug!keld