Joe's OS/2 Tips - Number 1

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Joe's OS/2 Tips
  1. Number 1
  2. Number 2
  3. Number 3
  4. Number 4
    1. Catalog - 1992-10-03
  5. Number 5
    1. Catalog - 1992-11-29
  6. Number 6
    1. Catalog - 1993-01-01
  7. Number 7
    1. Catalog - 1993-02-07
  8. Number 8
                    Joe's OS/2 Tips.
       Written by Joseph Mckinnon (61:560/0@Worldnet)
       Voice : (07)800-2225 - Proteus Technology.
       Downloaded from Proteus OS/2, Australia's Only SIMPLEX Site.
       Phone +61-7-800-3521    
       Hours 24 hours a day
       Speeds 300-9600, PEP, MNP, V42/Bis

Few people realize that the default OS/2 setup isn't exactly the best. The following document was written by myself, after experimenting with OS/2 version 2.0.

Abit of background about myself,

 I'am Joseph Mckinnon, I was introduced to OS/2 by Ernst Winter half
 way through 1991.  This seemed at the time like an ideal operating
 system for my requirements - Multi-tasking, solid and fast (ask my
 closest friends about my like for speed).  I joined the Early
 Experience Program through Adrian Collings (Critial Software Designs).
 From that day on I enjoyed the system and went about making the Beta
 Code run faster than normal, since, as you all know, Beta code is
 always slower than the real thing, due to the amount of extra
 'fail-safe' code built in to trap system errors.
 From this I've developed quite a good grounding in what things you
 should change to get the best.

Memory Requirements.

 From the starting post, IBM's minimal requirements would make me lose
 my temper at the preformance, since 4 meg is just enough to boot the
 System, let alone run any real applications.  Therefore, if you are
 considering to run OS/2 as the default operating system, I'd recommend
 for you to have at least 8 meg.  This way you can realy use your
 system.  Sure other companys may say that's too much for a normal
 user, I say Bull.  As far as I'am concerned if I like what I use I
 prefer speed than to run with one foot in lead and the other in
 plaster.
 With 8 meg of RAM, you can run multiple applications at a reasonable
 speed, with the defaults.  But, if you have patience (or a very fast
 machine 486-50mhz) you maybe able to live with 4 meg, and put up with
 the delay in loading applications, and noise from your Harddrive being
 constantly accessed (Why's this, read on).  Since OS/2 is an advanced
 operating system it takes advantage of many of the memory techniques
 found on Mini's and Mainframes, one of features of OS/2 is it's virtual
 memory.

Virtual Memory.

 This whole Idea is basically summed up in saying OS/2 uses the swapper
 file on your Harddrive as RAM to run programs in.  Thus on a 4 meg
 machine, OS/2 is continuly 'thrashing' the harddrive, since there's
 not enough physical RAM to run both your applications and OS/2
 properly. The advantage that OS/2 has over other 16 bit
 shells/operating systems is that OS/2's 32bit programming allows the
 system to work with small blocks of memory (4k) and therefore it's
 much more effective when swapping to the harddrive 16bit have
 to page out 64k chunks at a time, causing undue strain on the system.
 Especially when it it's reloading the same block to run 4k of code out
 of that segment, which of course these 16 bit shells tend to run
 slowly once they reach the end of physical RAM.

Physical Memory.

 This, of course is the amount of RAM your system contains.  OS/2 will
 use every bit of the RAM it can find, without you having to tell it
 what to use.  This is a BIG step forward over other memory managers,
 where you, the user (and generally inexperienced) has to sit down and
 work out what areas to include and exclude.  With OS/2's 32bit
 environment it's in theory capable of handling a GIG (4,096 Meg) of RAM!
 which of course is very hard to imagine.

The CONFIG.SYS file

 After installation of your system, OS/2 will install a default, use
 for all systems, CONFIG.SYS file.  At first glance, many new users
 will say 'Hey, I'am not going to even touch it', since it can range
 from about 20 lines to 40, depending on what you installed, etc.
 Inside this 'hideous creation' you'll find many interesting keywords
 for OS/2, EG MAXWAIT, IFS DPATH and many more, all totally alein from
 the DOS-World,  DON'T BE SCARED OFF BY THESE THINGS, it's all in the
 Online Help, take time to read about them, and experiement, otherwise
 you'll never feel confident.
 One thing that stands out is this line.
     PRINTMONBUFSIZE=132,132,132
 Which after you've read the online help (go on, that's what it's for),
 is the Printer Buffers, for LPT1,LPT2,LPT3.  So why reserve memory for
 unused printer ports?  Plus, if you don't do much printing, why
 reserve so much, when the system can use the memory for either itself
 or for your apps.  Therefore assign a value which suits your usage,
 mine is
     PRINTMONBUFSIZE=100,0,0
     THREADS=256
 Threads is the number of independent actions that OS/2 is expected to
 manage.  Each thread requires a small fraction of Physical RAM, thus
 if your not particularly running massive OS/2 Applications, which have
 many threads, then why reserve so many.  In case you're worried about
 not assigning enough, there is a small utility program called MAP57,
 which I'd recommend obtaining, since this will give you a report on
 the number of threads in use by your system (available from my BBS
 Proteus OS/2 +61-7-800-3521).  With this utility I was able to halve
 my default setting to 128, which is still rather high, but it's better
 to have more than required, otherwise your system's preformance will
 be terrible if you remove to many.
     THREADS=128
     IFS=D:\OS2\HPFS.IFS  /CACHE:64 /AUTOCHECK:DE /CRECL:4
 This is the HPFS (High Preformance File System - Requires at least 6
 meg Physical RAM) controlling line.  It's very annoying to see OS/2
 install a 196k Cache on my system, because it's eating to much RAM for
 my setup.  My Hardrive has a 64k Cache built-in, so why tie up more
 physical RAM.  I've had this set to 196, and other values, but after
 much trial and error I found that 64k cache on the HD and the IFS give
 me the same preformance results.  Some people are setting this at
 incrediable settings, eg 1024k, etc which may have been great under DOS,
 but under OS/2 it's useless if you've only got limited memory available.
 I suggest that you play trial & error with this setting because every
 system setup is different, but keep in mind, DON'T GO OVERBOARD,
 swapping memory in and out makes your system slower, no matter how
 fast your harddrive may be.
     PATH
 AS in DOS, this command along with the others (DPATH, LIBPATH, HELP)
 define where to look for files to run (or in the other ones, where to
 find specific files eg Help files).  I find that people tend to throw
 all their program paths into these statements, so that they can be in
 any directory and load that file.  That's great, but why setup your
 system like this, since your system searches all these paths until it
 finds the application.  Which, of course, is an un-necessary process.
 You should be making a program icon for that particular app, and
 activiate with the mouse rather than at the command line, quicker and
 much more easier for other users.  Plus that's what GUI's are designed
 for.
     AUTOFAIL and PAUSEONERROR
 If you're like me, and hate seeing the Abort, Retry, Ignore responses
 under DOS, you can make OS/2 take the easy way out for you.  How
 often have you got you drives mixed up and told DOS to go to drive B
 instead of A and the drive sits there looking at nothing (that is of
 course if you've got the PROMPT returning current directory details
 for you), OS/2 will not prompt you with Abort, Retry, Ignore if
 Autofail is active, instead it will return saying
     D:\>b:
     SYS0015: The system cannot find the drive specified.
     MAXWAIT
 Provides OS/2 the ability to change priority settings of a thread to a
 higher number after it hasn't recieved processor attention after a
 specified period.  This is from the online help.  I've got mine set to
 1 because I run a BBS which I want to preform like a rocket at all
 times.

RUNNING DOS/WINDOWS APPS

  If you're not planning on running anything else at the same time, 1 dos
  application, the defaults are okay.  If you plan on running an OS/2
  app and dos apps, I'd recommend setting the IDLE_SENSITIVITY to about
  10, then your DOS and OS/2 will work at greatly improved preformance.
  Many apps require fine tuning which I can't cover in this document.
  I prefer to run system native apps - OS/2 applications wherever
  possible.

RUNNING OS/2 APPS

  Basically ALL OS/2 apps take advantage of the system, and are very
  friendly to the system, in that they will request only what
  processing power they require and in turn 'hand-over' any processing
  power when they aren't working.  This is why you should really be
  converting to OS/2 applications, because they are system aware,
  rather than like DOS/WINDOWS apps which tend to be system resource
  hogs.  One Major feature of OS/2 is the ablility for OS/2 to reload
  after a power failure all the OS/2 apps that were running and usually
  to a point just before the power failure, which is extremely helpful
  feature.

THE BAD APP SYNDROME.

  Under DOS/WINDOWS/DV there are certian applications which kill the
  entire system, generally known as Bad Apps, or another popular one
  the UAE (unrecoverable appliaction error made famous by windows).
  Under Windows, a UAE (or these days the program has just done this
  please shutdown and reboot) is fatal! Since you usually have to
  reach for the Big Red switch (or the big White one for PS/2s) and
  power OFF to recover.  Not a nice method of system recovery.
  Under OS/2, the same types of progams can cause the system to abort.
  But in this case the abort is simply the window in which that
  application was started in, therefore you just double click on the
  mouse button to close that window, and the problem has been removed.
  OS/2 then continues on uncaring about that hiccup and in actual fact
  when this hiccup occured the other apps are still processing, not
  stopped and waiting.  OS/2 can do this becasue it takes advantage of
  advanced programming methods to isolate each application from each
  other and literally providing a whole computer system per-window,
  thus the bad app is simply 'killed-off' and as far as the other apps
  are concerned nothing happened.
  Sometimes the Crash does affect OS/2, but never fear Pressing
  CTRL-ESCAPE a few times and waiting about 1 minute will cause the
  main system thread to preform a fail-safe step, where a window will
  pop-up and says Press Return to restart the Shell and all processes
  running will remain running.  There is a small chance of losing data,
  but I havn't yet, nor is this an everyday occurence.  This once
  happened while a user was online downloading a file, and he never knew
  there was anything wrong, this is a true indication of the protection that
  OS/2 gives to it's processes!