From: Christopher Avans <parka@cdc.net>
Date: Friday, January 22, 1999 1:58 AM
>should ask yourself do i realy want ASCII Pfiles whats the diffrence? The
>advantages? disadvantages and if you cant answer any of these depending on
>run time execution load or diffrence between ide or scsii ASCII saves
>(Ie if you on a SCSII3 and move to a non scsii u screwed if you have
>ASCII), you should stick with the stock binary pfiles which are handled
>_well_. And as far as someone on this post claiming the ASCII loads faster
>or as fast as binary and saves memory My SE teacher at my graduate school
>got a great laugh at your expense. sorry.
Lacking the benefit of graduate-level english, I'm having difficulty making
sense of much of the above. I'm getting the impression you still haven't done
any testing to support your opinion
Fact: On my two computers at home, neither ascii nor stock binary take any
measurable time loading/saving (probably due to disk caching).
Fact: On the system I originally did my comparison tests (an ISP's pentium
200 loaded down by 4 muds and several other users running various tasks),
ascii loaded and saved 5-40% faster than stock binary (pl12), depending on
system load.
Fact: In every multi-process environment I've worked with, disk access has
been the biggest bottleneck, as several processes trying to access the
filesystem simultaneously have to wait in line for access.
Fact: CPU time is much easier to come by. The only syetm I've had cpu
trouble on had even more pitiful disk access.
Fact: Ascii pfiles are much smaller than binary, therefore require less disk
access.
Opinion: Unless you run your mud on a system with a faster file system that
performs better than your cpu, the small amount of time spent on ascii file
parsing will be less than or equal to the amount of time gained by quicker
loads and saves.
Fact: I've obviously only done limited testing, and would be interest to see
what kind of numbers other people are getting.
Sam
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