SFS - best settings
  • Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Cego
    Posts: 693 from 2006/5/28
    From: Germany
    Hi there!

    I am using MorphOS 3.17 on a Peg2 with a 256GB SSD and was wondering what the optimal settings are for SFS?

    When extracting large zip files (1GB) it takes a lot of time until the first files are written.
    It seems that the system is buffering files before it begins to write them to harddisk. Is there a way to speed this up or is this a hardware limit?
    On the amiga f.e. extracted lha archives are directly written to harddisk afair without any buffering.

    greets,
    Cego
    Pegasos II G4 @1.0GHz, 1GB DDR Ram, Radeon 9200Pro, 240GB SSD+160GB HD, MorphOS 3.18, AmigaOS4.1 FE, Debian 8
  • »02.10.22 - 22:33
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  • MorphOS Developer
    jacadcaps
    Posts: 2968 from 2003/3/5
    From: Canada
    Sure it isn’t the zip archive scan going on first? Zip has very messy headers.
  • »02.10.22 - 23:18
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  • Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Cego
    Posts: 693 from 2006/5/28
    From: Germany
    why is the scan taking so long? It takes a lot of time with all bigger archives.
    On other systems extracting is done almost immediately.
    Pegasos II G4 @1.0GHz, 1GB DDR Ram, Radeon 9200Pro, 240GB SSD+160GB HD, MorphOS 3.18, AmigaOS4.1 FE, Debian 8
  • »05.10.22 - 21:28
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  • MorphOS Developer
    jacadcaps
    Posts: 2968 from 2003/3/5
    From: Canada
    Many possible reasons. You haven't even mentioned what you are using to extract (Ambient vs xadunfile, etc). Your HDD might be fragmented or, yes, your SFS doesn't have enough buffers. The defaults are conservative since some of our systems have little RAM.

    You can check the buffers with 'addbuffers sys:' etc, increase them in HDConfig or via user-startup. I'd recommend something between 512 and 2048.

    SFS buffers can be adjusted in SFS in MorphOS Preferences. For an SSD you might want to use a bigger Read-Ahead buffer and likely increase the Buffer Lines.

    Note that all of those will eat quite a bit of your RAM.
  • »06.10.22 - 18:23
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  • Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Cego
    Posts: 693 from 2006/5/28
    From: Germany
    The zip file is a copy of Curse Of Monkey Island for ScummVM with a size of around 866MB.

    I extracted it using ambient. Opened the zip archive and saved the content via drag n drop. Took 5:58 minutes.
    Using a shell with unzip command is a lot faster though. Takes only 2:18 minutes.

    Is Ambient messing up something or just unoptimized?
    Pegasos II G4 @1.0GHz, 1GB DDR Ram, Radeon 9200Pro, 240GB SSD+160GB HD, MorphOS 3.18, AmigaOS4.1 FE, Debian 8
  • »07.10.22 - 00:27
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  • MorphOS Developer
    jacadcaps
    Posts: 2968 from 2003/3/5
    From: Canada
    unzip will extract files in the order they are archived while Ambient would extract them in the order you've selected them in the lister.
  • »07.10.22 - 12:23
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