Clarence Verge ( )
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Speeding up Arachne local operations - Speed tip #1

As promised, I'm not going to waste space complaining about the fact that all the text version links here take you back to the graphic home page. I'll leave that up to you. Complain early and complain often.

This weekend I'll pass along a tip that can make a substantial speed improvement to Arachne operation whether you have a 20Mhz '386 or a P150. All speed improvements are more obvious on slower machines and the best thing that you can do for a slow computer is to stop Arachne from loading background .GIFs.

The easy method is to just delete or rename all .GIFS in the Arachne main directory except XCH.gif and Strobo.gif. This will work well for medium speed computers but for the maximum improvement you will have to edit every internal screen that you happen to encounter that has a background image, to prevent Arachne from wasting her time looking for the image. By image I mean a background texture or a shaded color.

The first one everyone gets to see is on the dialer page - PPP_BACK.gif. That image takes a long time to load even on a '486. Another one you will encounter early is the background used for the HELP page and HOTKEYS info. Sometimes these pages are quite difficult to read in monochrome. All the setup pages use SETUP.gif found in \system\gui\.

Whenever you encounter one of the above pages, hit F4. The HTML that specifies the page layout will appear on your screen. Near the top you will see the words BODY BACKGROUND="...." Delete everything between the quotation marks and hit F2. Examine the screen carefully. On some pages the color of text on white backgrounds may change from black to white. This seems to be a slight bug that shows up when the text color hasn't been specified and there is no background image. Now hit F2 again. If you find a white on white text problem, replace the BACKGROUND="" with TEXT=BLACK. On pages where the problem doesn't occur, like the dialer page for instance, you can simply delete the word BACKGROUND and everything following it up to the first space. These measures prevent Arachne from even processing the tag. If BODY BACKGROUND="... is the only thing on the line, delete the whole line.

Here are the results I got on the dialer page using a 20Mhz '386 with Arachne 1.66 on a ramdisk:
Unaltered load time 18sec
BACKGROUND="" 5 sec
Delete PHONE.GIF 4 sec
Old PPP_INIT.htm 3 sec.

One question I received asked how to run Arachne shrunken into a Win9x DOS window. I don't think that is possible because Arachne drives the screen directly and not through Windows video services. When I tried it myself in a W95 window she took over the whole screen. But Vitex has a screenshot showing Arachne in a window using Stub32. Does anyone have experience with this ? Have FUN. 8-)