[Coco] Question for those familiar with rbf.mn

L. Curtis Boyle curtisboyle at sasktel.net
Sun Feb 1 11:37:41 EST 2015


Hmm… I didn’t think it failed, just returned the segment list full error - it may have left all the blocks allocated, instead of cleaning up after itself, though. We hit this a few times at work (probably the worst was when the Atlanta Braves sent a file that was about 10-11 MB zipped - it was huge fixed length text file, bigger than the size of our 80 MB hard drive at the time. I had to write a program to read a line at a time from the ZIP using pipes, strip out all the stuff we didn’t need, and then write out the shortened line, in order to extract the data we needed).

L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net



> On Feb 1, 2015, at 2:21 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sunday 01 February 2015 02:36:21 Allen Huffman did opine
> And Gene did reply:
>>> On Jan 31, 2015, at 1:06 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> By then I had been campaigning to
>>> get folks to raise the default value of it.sas in their rbf file
>>> descriptors from $09 to at least $10, and I was using from $20 to $FF
>>> in order to assure both non-fragmented files, AND at the same time
>>> prevent ever coming close to a segment list full error because if
>>> you do, nitros9's recovery from isn't pretty.
>> 
>> Gene,
>> 
>> What happens if a block is not found that size? Does it just fail, or
>> will it use the largest it can find?
> 
> Generally, that write will fail, but if it did, I would not kill the 
> process, I would hop over to another window and cut the sas in half with 
> dmode, effectively making less than normal sas sized bits of the drive 
> usable.
> 
>> I ran in to an issue tonight that I believe is caused by having a
>> nearly full hard drive. Somehow things went from “zippyâ€‌ to
>> “molassesâ€‌ real quick, so I’m still not quite sure if that is
>> the root cause.  I am running the JWT Enterprises “Optimizeâ€‌
>> program on my drive right now. It’s a defragmenter, not an
>> optimizer, so it just ensures files have now more than X segments
>> (whatever you specify, default 1). As a bonus, it will pack
>> directories cleaning up deleted entries, and can optionally float
>> directories to the top.
>> 
>> You can even run it on files in just one directory. It’s a great
>> thing, and was lightspeed compared to a true defragmenter program like
>> Burke & Burkes (though that did a better job overall once you let it
>> run for 20 hours).
>> 
> The last time I ran it, it was way more than 20 hours.  But I haven't run 
> it in probably 10 years now.
> 
>> I made a .DSK image of a floppy drive last night using a B09 program I
>> wrote. I see that image is 19 segments (though it has been the only
>> file found that has any fragments so far).
>> 
> I suspect the majority of the time is being spent looking for a sas sized 
> place to put it. 128(131 something in decimal) megs is the largest that 
> can be represented in the FAT when the cluster size is 1.  The system 
> does, or did, keep track and did not have to search the whole FAT in the 
> past except for the first write after a reboot.  After that it got 
> noticeably faster when I was still using a Maxtor 7120s drive on a 4n1 
> controller.
> 
> I have 2 identical seagate hawk 1Gb drives on my system, one of which is 
> only formatted for about 490 megs for os9, the remainder available for 
> HDBDOS and vdisks, so if I ever wanted to, I could setup several more 
> HDBDOS "partitions" of 256 disks each since3 each such allocation is just 
> over 80 megs.  The other I formatted all for os9.  Drive 0 uses a cluster 
> size of 4 sectors, while drive 1 (/s1 in my  lashup) uses a 16 sector 
> cluster.  Neither seems to be suffering from the nearly full FAT so far.
> 
>> I am going to adjust my min allocation. Thank you for the repeated
>> encouragement. I did not realize i would fill 128MB as quickly as I
>> did :)
> 
>> 
>> --
>> Allen Huffman - PO Box 22031 - Clive IA 50325 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT
>> only) Sub-Etha Software - http://www.subethasoftware.com - Established
>> 1990! Sent from my MacBook.
>> 
>> P.S. Since 4/15/14, I have earned OVER $600  in Amazon gift cards via
>> Swagbucks! Use my link and I get credit:
>> http://swagbucks.com/refer/allenhuffman
> 
> 
> Cheers, Gene Heskett
> -- 
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
> US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS
> 
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