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As
Fred gets older, people behind his broad back call him Nero Wolfe.
Fred’s weight has a lot to do with it, but also his tendency not to
leave the office/ home loop.
Well,
this September Fred actually went to some clients’ sites to see
problems in actual production. Now,
of course, these were not Unibase code problems, but sufficiently
closely related so that Fred was getting teased that they were Unibase
problems.
Rumors
that Novell NetWare 4.x and NetWare 5.x were slower than the benchmark
Novel NetWare 3.x did not bother Fred. Everybody knows that the newer
operating systems are slower than the older ones, or do they?
The
problem was the extra minute or so to load an image at this particular
client. The response was slower the more workstations were running.
Adding insult to injury, the DMAC client had a five-year-old version
of Unibase which, when installed, did not slow down. For the Bug
Detectives reading, this was enough data to lead to a solution.
In
the field Fred started changing the source for Unibase Imaging by
adding debug to find where the slowdown occurred. First problem was
that Fred’s laptop did not have enough power to run the Internet
connection and the floppy drive with both connected. Sneaker Net to
the rescue.
Voila!
The extra time occurred when Unibase Imaging did a stat of a file! The
Client Web Guru got on the Web and found the Novell Bug and FIX
relating to such a problem. He found the problem at http://support.novell.com/servlet/tidfinder/noheader/10021744
Novell
calls it, “Slow file system performance in a directory with
excessive files.” Excessive
files are defined to be over 18000 files in a directory. Novell’s
explanation is fine, but the fix works and that is what counts. So, if
your Novell NetWare 4.x or 5.x runs slowly, try this fix.
Fred
enjoyed the flight out and back and the wonderful dinner the client
provided. Tina Kay, alias Archie Goodwin, came along too, because DMAC
does not let Fred out without a keeper.
See
the related article about graphics cards.
In his excitement over solving the Novell problem, Fred offered
to play again with Graphics cards in 16-bit mode and get one more type
of card working.
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