Thanks Thomas.


>Hi Jim,
>
>it mostly basic stuff which wasn't done when the group
>of 8 pc's was set up. These were quite niche machines
>("back then")
>PIII 800,
>1GB of Ram,
>1 5400 IDE,
>1 7200 IDE
>Nt 4 SP5
>
>upgraded to current drivers for graphics, LAN,
>and most significant: busmaster IDE,
>which is NOT used by default in NT4.
>
>Switched LAN from TCP/IP to NetBEUI
>(was a physically closed net for security reasons already,
>so catch the better performance in a small networks)
>upgraded to SP6a, reset the size of filesystem cache
>since the machines had lots of RAM not used by the
>(FPW!!) application. Set NT not to swap out, since
>most of the memory was still unused.
>USED the 2 different drives to balance IO
>and reduce head movement.
>
>That cut exectuion times of the smallest datasets
>from 84H to 48H. Since the execution times grew
>nonlinearly with the data set size, I put together
>a small profiling tool in 16-bit c++ and found
>the relevant calls. I then optimized (mostly in the
>searching routines) and cut execution times down
>by a factor between 8 and (estimated) 15,
>depending on the dataset size.
>
>Since this was a legacy app converting host data
>to FPW data structures and now used with very large
>data samples for datamining purposes, this result
>was "good enough" for quarterly operations.
>
>Regards,
>
>thomas