well maybe qmodem is the limiting factor ?

As I mentioned above, other games would have performance issues too - once they went to read in or write to save games. After that since it's all in memory the system just grooves right along.

I did some testing, anytime read or write to a folder mounted as a disk on dosbox it grinds to a crawl. I tried using UGE, copying files into/out of the folder while dosbox was running, etc.

It seems that ANY disk activity causes it to slow down, which is why I'm curious if there's actually a problem or if I just haven't used a mount switch or something to properly align it with performance?

All the program tells you how to do is 'mount c c:\dosboxdrive'.

Do you have enough memory (physical)? One thing I could imagine is bad disk performance due to low memory (dosbox easily takes 100MB depending on your settings).

The system has 512mb of memory in it, and the dosbox is given 16mb. Checking my system usage it never gets close to max memory usage either.

Windows won't let it get to max because it will start using your hard drive as "virtual memory". As a result, your computer and disk access will both become slower and slower as programs request more and more RAM from the OS.

512 should be enough though as long as you aren't running much of anything else in the background.

Yeah I know how swap space works :] but it won't usually touch it unless you're within 95% or so actively in use out of your system memory.

So, with system resources discounted as not the problem - any idea what is going on and why?

That's not true. I have a gigabyte of RAM. About 680MB is free, yet WinXP is using 323MB of my 5GB pagefile.

The PF monitor in Task Manager is not what you think. Get an actual PF monitor. You'll probably be suprised how little is used.

Lets stay focused here ;] I/O problems! Anyone have any clue how to improve read/write to the mounted disk/folder?

Has no one else noticed this sort of thing? Test it like this: startup dosbox and run anything you want that will continue running - then drop some files into a folder that's mounted in dosbox. On my system (all of them actually, both xp and 2k) the program running will just about grind to a halt - and it's not even the one accessing the disk.

If you have something that does access the disk itself (qmodem for scripts, UGE for game files, just about anything for save games) it will really crawl when trying to get a file - the larger the file the worse it will be. IE loading a 5kb game file for Master of Magic isn't too bad, but qmodem reading in that 64kb script I told about just kills it. takes over 10 seconds (no matter how many cycles I give dosbox) to get anywhere at all.

No, I haven't noticed that. I don't tend to move files in and out a lot, although I do use game data viewers for Wiz6&7 while playing them in DOSBox and haven't noticed any such problems. I usually have some disk-intensive apps running in the background too.

Do you have the latest drivers installed for your motherboard chipset? (assuming you're using an on-board disk controller)

Oops, last post was me.

My laptop (2k) only has basic windows motherboard drivers installed. My desktop though (xp) has the specific via chipset drivers installed and is tuned from ground up to run games and be a high performance environment.

If anything - the laptop should run slow and the desktop should be fine - but both have the same performance issue.

VIA sucks. Every VIA-based motherboard I've had for the last half-dozen years has had performance and stability issues even with the latest Hyperion 4-in-1 drivers installed.

Also, make sure you're using the 4-in-1's (with the IDE filter driver) and not the IDE miniport driver that is available separately. That totally killed performance on my last computer, although it took me a while to discover it.

You don't have any on-access virus scanning going on do you?

Also, you should try snagging a recent CVS version of DOSBox. I don't have a link handy unfortunately.

Well it's not like I have a choice of what's on my motherboard. I've never had bad experience with VIA anyways *shrug*.

Latest 4-in-1 drivers are the ones installed, no virus software installed (safe surfing practices and a decent firewall between me and the net has kept me virus free for 5+ years - and yes I do check every so often, I just don't leave it installed).

I'll try a cvs version and see if anything different happens.

Hmm - are there nightly compiles available from cvs? If it's just source I have no way to build it myself.

CVS Builds By AEP

Same issues, using both the optimized and non-optimized builds..

Damnit. This is really starting to be frustrating.

I don't think that this is a dosbox problem. You said that if you copy files into a mounted directory then you experience problems. The thing is DosBox doesn't really recognize new files until you refresh it's cache.

Have you chkdsk/defragedd your HD lately? I've noticed a fragmented/corrupted MFT can really slow down performance.

Also have you loaded up perfmon and monitored HD activity?

If I copy anything in there, edit anything in there (whether from inside dosbox with a program or outside it directly editing a file in the folder), or reading/writing anything in there.

I'll defrag and try again but am skeptical of it. Will also take a look at perfmon. Thanks for the suggestion.