[arachne] Re: arachne Digest V2 #144 (download stalls)

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Greg,

I realize that ISA (or VESA, if your 486 supports it) serial
cards may be hard to find these days, but you really should
try to get one with a 16550A or equivalent UART. If you can,
this should not cost very much (typically A$5-20) and will
definitely improve matters. I used to get great Internet
performance from my old 386DX-40, so your CPU isn't the
main problem here, just your UART. Alternatively, if your
serial card has a 40 pin socket, you may be able to buy
a 16550A UART for it, although these actually cost more
than a new card (last time I checked).

A simple experiment you can try is to set your baud rate
to 9600, then dial your ISP and try downloading HTML pages.
You will find that stalls are far less frequent than with higher
baud rates and your download time will actually improve! Of
course, downloading other files will be slower, but I'm talking
about the HTML problem.

Again, I'm not sure about your claims concerning M$-DOS
(was this with the same hardware, drivers, TSR's, Arachne
settings, etc., etc.?), but if true, is remarkable and M$ should
be commended for such performance.

Joe.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Greg Mayman [SMTP:gmone@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2004 2:19 PM
> To:   arachne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:      [arachne] Re: arachne Digest V2 #144 (download stalls)
> 
> Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!
> 
> On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:26:59 +1000, da Silva, Joe wrote:
> 
> >     The reason I ask is because the Arachne 1.73;GPL package
> >     includes LSPPP 0.75, so it is easy to overwrite another,
> >     newer version of LSPPP (eg. 1.01) with this older (buggy) version.
> 
> I never realized that. Yes, I just checked and it is there.
> 
> >     You can type "lsppp /?" to see what version you really have.
> 
> It tells me that it is v1.01.
> 
> >     Greg, how suitable the 8250/16450 is, depends on
> >     the situation. If you have near 100% CPU availability
> >     to service the UART, you can achieve great things
> >     with an 8250/16450. However, you don't always have
> >     this luxury, depending on what applications and
> >     drivers and TSR's are running. So in practice, you
> >     invariably need a 16550A UART, which has a FIFO
> >     that can buffer a few incoming data bytes while the
> >     CPU is busy drawing some graphics, or writing to
> >     disk, or whatever.
> 
> So with graphics downloads turned off, I can expect the
> 8250/16450 UART to give me _eight_minute_ delays on a 2kbyte
> block of a 12203 byte page? I don't think so....
> 
> >     This is something most Arachne users will already
> >     be aware of, so you will find very few others here
> >     using an 8250/16450 UART.
> 
> There probably aren't many using a 486/33MHz CPU, either, or only
> 12 meg of RAM, or a 512M hard disk, but that's what I'm stuck
> with.
> 
> I would upgrade if I could afford to!
> 
> But I can't afford to, so that is that!
> 
> >     Your comment about M$-DOS is interesting, although
> >       I have doubts about its accuracy.
> 
> What do you mean "doubts about its accuracy"?
> 
> Are you implying that I'm "stretching the truth" when I say I
> have a lot less trouble with the MS-DOS + Arachne combination?
> 
> Sheesh! A 7kbyte page that takes over over 2 minutes under
> OpenDOS, and a 12k page that can't get past halfway after eight
> minutes....
> 
> These pages download in less than 10 seconds under MS-DOS.
> 
> I'm no lover of Micro$not, but what accuracy do you want?
> 
> Greg M.
> 
> Arachne at FreeLists
> -- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --


Arachne at FreeLists
-- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --

Other related posts: