Thanks, Ted!

Ted Gould wrote:
> Here's a better explaination than I could write:
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Partition.html#FRAGMENTATION
> 

Here's the other side of my previous tirade about Linux
on the desktop (to be revisited later).  Even worse is
Microsoft in batch mode, where you are actually stressing
your memory and disk capacity.  The fragmentation thing
is only a part of this, but a big part.

That article says nothing about NTFS.  I am using a Win2k
system to run an ad hoc Perl application I wrote at work.
It is a memory hog - loads lots of tables into RAM - and
if the job exceeds a certain size it starts to thrash the disk
miserably.

When a big job is done, Perl (ActiveState) can spend up to
eight minutes trying to release all that memory and
continuing to churn the disk before it can terminate.
So I have to abort it, and then I generally reboot to
make sure it hasn't messed up the system.  And of course
before running a really big job, I reboot and come up
without Outlook.

Be thankful if you are doing your batch processing on a
system that has a respectable file system and virtual
memory setup.  In this area, any *nix system seems to be
way ahead of the same box with Microsoft.

Since our department has not gotten the IT department to
budget or review this application, I can't get permission
to run it on one of the production Unix boxes.  That
would make it SO easy -- in fact, I could then automate
the whole stupid thing so I'd just be looking at results
afterward.

As much as one might get used to Microsoft on the desktop,
it is *really* terrible at any kind of real data processing.
I'm so spoiled with batch jobs just zipping through on a
*nix box.  This is especially true in cases where you are
traversing a lot of files, or overloading memory.

Vic