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| Author |
Message |
| 19 new of 68 responses total. |
richard
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response 50 of 68:
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Sep 13 20:22 UTC 1997 |
Of course once grex is ISDN-connected, that may change.
(I actually multi-tasked grex this morning...I hadnt read Agora in two
days and had 25 items to read, so I did a Backtalk vs. Picospan contest
and ran Agora on both at the same time, just to see which got me through
it faster. And..drum roll...Backtalk won. Normally Picospan would've
won easily but I guess it was a bad morning to be telnetting *shrug*)
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scott
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response 51 of 68:
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Sep 13 23:06 UTC 1997 |
Richard, Grex can do mail faster, with a different mail program. Pine is the
slowest thing ever written. "mail" (the program) may be less friendly, but
it is a heck of a lot faster.
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orinoco
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response 52 of 68:
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Sep 14 00:55 UTC 1997 |
Yeah, I've always used mail, and it's slow to load, but no slower than
anything else is on grex. Certainly not unbearable.
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valerie
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response 53 of 68:
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Sep 15 02:14 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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senna
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response 54 of 68:
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Sep 15 06:14 UTC 1997 |
I type fast enough to have similar problems with richard when I type
constantly, but usually I type a bit slower because my thoughts aren't all
that gathered until I put them out. It's nice to be able to type fast enough
to keep up with my thinking. I used to outrace grex enough that my old telnet
program would lock me out and freeze. It was the original impetus for getting
multiple logins.
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valerie
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response 55 of 68:
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Sep 15 14:09 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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richard
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response 56 of 68:
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Sep 15 23:39 UTC 1997 |
why would running two editors at once hurt my .cf participation file?
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mdw
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response 57 of 68:
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Sep 16 00:42 UTC 1997 |
Running two editors at once won't, unless you're editting your
participation file. If you are editting your participation files by
hand, then one editor is more than sufficient to damage the contents.
I presume, though, that you mean running PicoSpan and Backtalk.
PicoSpan reads your participation file when you enter a conference, and
writes it out when you leave. If you run 2 copies of PicoSpan on the
same conference, neither will know what the other has read, and when you
leave the conference, the items that were marked seen for you will
reflect whichever copy of PicoSpan last wrote the file out. If you were
to leave the conference "at the same time" in both copies, then it is
possible, although unlikely, that you could end up with a corrupted
participation file (in practice, running out of disk space, or an I/O
error, are more likely causes of a damaged file).
When you use backtalk, the rules are different. I don't know exactly
what Jan did, but most likely, most of the time, when you're reading
stuff via the web, there is nothing at all running on grex. Only when
you do something that causes your web browser to GET or POST a form on
grex, is there any opportunity for backtalk to update your participation
file. Most likely, therefore, backtalk updates your participation file
*each time* you read a new item. So, if you had 2 copies of backtalk
running at exactly the same time, it's possible (but unlikely) that they
could trash your participation files. There are actually more ways for
it to fail, because backtalk has to both read *and* write the file. So,
bad things could happen if the second session is reading the file before
the first session finishes writing it.
If you ran both backtalk and picospan at the same time, but only did
things with one at a time, then, most likely, PicoSpan will not "see"
any changes made by backtalk while PicoSpan is in that conference, and
when PicoSpan leaves that conference, any items marked "seen" only by
backtalk, will revert to whatever state PicoSpan has remembered.
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mta
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response 58 of 68:
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Sep 16 02:11 UTC 1997 |
Which will look close enough to "trashed" from your perspective that
it's better not to do it.
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srw
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response 59 of 68:
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Sep 16 18:35 UTC 1997 |
The main reason not to fo it is that neither will know what the other
has seen. The result is that it is not updated properly. This is not
really *corrupt*, but it is bad.
Marcus is right that backtalk updates the participation file more often
thatn picospan. Piocspan keeps its updated copy in core, and only writes
it out when you switch conferences, exit, or explicitly request it.
Picospan is thus more efficient with respect to file accesses, but is
more prone to leaving the participation file out of date when there's a
crash or other catastrophe.
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dang
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response 60 of 68:
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Sep 17 22:21 UTC 1997 |
(Actually, picospan writes my participation file at the end of every item for
me, so backtalk and picospan would both be writing once an item.)
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valerie
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response 61 of 68:
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Sep 18 04:04 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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janc
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response 62 of 68:
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Sep 18 14:45 UTC 1997 |
Backtalk does read and write the participation file each time you read
an item. It holds a lock on the participation file between those two
events, and I'm reasonably sure the locking is compatible with Picospan.
I presume Picospan, like Yapp, only locks while reading or writing, not
between. Thus, if you read with both at once, some of the things you
read with Backtalk may show up unread again, but everything you read
with Picospan should be OK, since Backtalk will not clobber Picospan's
data. I've often used both to read at once (using "set autosave" in
Picospan) and haven't had any big problems. It seems to work better
than I would expect it to. I don't know why.
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janc
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response 63 of 68:
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Sep 18 14:48 UTC 1997 |
Oh, by the way, using Backtalk and Picospan simultaneously to read
*different* conferences is 100% safe.
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mta
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response 64 of 68:
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Sep 18 18:05 UTC 1997 |
Which is they way I've always done it. It's very efficient use of time.
Dunno, though, how efficient a use of Grexes resources it is, so I've
stopped.
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mdw
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response 65 of 68:
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Sep 19 15:24 UTC 1997 |
PicoSpan never locks participation files, and won't respect
any file locks that might be present.
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janc
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response 66 of 68:
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Sep 21 14:26 UTC 1997 |
That makes things a bit scarier. I would thus advise not using Backtalk
and Picospan on the same conference at the same time unless you don't
care too much about your participation files getting trashed. The same
goes for two Picospan invocations, but not for two Backtalk invocations.
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kaplan
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response 67 of 68:
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Sep 24 22:39 UTC 1997 |
Backtalk in anonymous mode would be perfectly safe. Run Picospan and as many
anonymous Backtalks as you want.
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valerie
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response 68 of 68:
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Sep 30 22:31 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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