Netbooted bands run slower?

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Tue, 15 May 90 07:23 PDT
    From: Kalman Reti <Reti@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

    In fact, from a fragmenting perspective things should be the other way around.
    It is possible to create an incredibly fragmented world file (just copy a band
    while slowly writing another file on the same FEP unit, each will get alternating
    8 block chunks of the disk), but all the standard methods for creating paging
    files that I can think of allocate the blocks at once, thereby getting the best
    non-fragmentation that the current state of the disk has to offer.

I don't think copying a band would create a fragmented world as you
describe.  I think the band transfer software creates a destination FEP
file of the appropriate size at the beginning of the transfer.

    I'd look at your user's paging files by running SI:PRINT-FEP-FILESYSTEM to see
    if they actually are badly fragmented.  Within Symbolics lots of people routinely
    run netbooted worlds and no one has reported a similar performance loss.

Thanks for the suggestion.

                                                barmar