Thoresby Limited.


Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 09:49:42 -0400


Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496

Subject:   DOS performance under Win 2000


Hello Rod

Please excuse my butting in to your conversations with MicroSoft concerning your DOS performance problems. I discovered your tome on the subject whilst searching the net for answers to this very problem.

For purposes of testing I have used:

Dell Dimension 1Ghz, 256Mb, Win98
Dell Power Edge 300, 256Mb, Win2000 Advanced Server
Dell Power Edge 300, 256Mb, Netware 3.12 (don't ask), Advantage

Database Server

Intel IN-Business 10/100 switch
100Mhz network cards in all machines
A 20Mb .DBF/.CDX file containing 37,000 records.

For a locate on a field containing a non-existent value (i.e.. read all records in file), using a DOS database browser, I have the following results.

For the file held on the Netware Server using IPX 


    From Win98..................... 5 secs
    From WIn2000.................. 83 secs
For the file held on the Netware Server using IP (ADSDOSIP layer) 

    From Win98.................... 26.secs
    From WIn2000.................. 37.secs
For the file held on locally on the C: drive 

    From Win98..................... 8 secs
    From WIn2000................... 6.secs (much faster drives)

From these results I conclude:

As expected, network results are better than local disk results on Win98

As expected, IPX is faster than IP on Win98

IP is faster than IPX on Win2000

This leads me to believe that IPX has been either deliberately or accidentally crippled.

Local disk results show that it is not DOS or the DOS program which is at fault.

It would appear that the Win2000 network layers for DOS have been crippled.

MicroSoft are quite adamant that they want a world without DOS. Whether they have set out to ruin DOS performance or have just been incompetent remains to be seen. My feelings are that the root cause of the problem is the interaction between PCI network cards and the DOS network layers. Unfortunately I am not able to try an ISA network card in the Win2000 PC. I have heard that only one buffer is allocated to networking in a DOS session. The use of the BUFFERS command in CONFIG.NT has no effect, so you can't raise the quantity. If this is the case then using only one buffer woulddefinitely cripple networking from DOS.

I hope this mail has depressed you even more. If you have found a resolution to this crisis I would be very interested to hear it.

Regards,

Thornsby Limited


Les Hughes
thoresby@compuserve.com