I need to spindown the hard drive while still keeping my GUI photon application active. Unfortunately, the application is accessing this hard disk to load widgets etc…not sure exactly what is loaded from Photon libraries since I am linking to the static libraries. I moved the application, Photon, fonts, and libraries to a ramdrive in the hopes of preventing the harddrive access. This seems to work but the application widgets now behave erraticly(buttons to do not retain state correct…various anomalies). Its like I am missing some magic cache file that holds the states of widgets and resources?
Anyone have any idea how I can spin the disk down and get the application to load all its resources so it does not need to goto hard disk? We are using a touchscreen and the delay when a user touches the screen while the disk is spundown is upwards of 5 seconds. This is not acceptable for the application.
When you develop using PhAB, it creates resource records which are stored on the disk in the executable. Depending what your application does, it may have to access the executable to load these resources.
The easiest solution should be to place the executables from ramdisk as you tried. I can’t think of any reason why that shouldn’t work, so perhaps the trick is to track down why you are having problems with that. The only thing I can think of is accessing data off the ramdisk is revealing existing bugs in your app which were hidden by the slower disk access.
The best I can say at this point is that solution should work.
It turned out to be phfont, the font manager was using files from the hard disk. Moved these into RAM and the problem was resolved. The interesting thing is the button anamolies that were occuring have disappeared as well with this change.
Thanks for the reply Rick, I was ready to give up on this and go another way…was starting to think the driver for the ramdrive was bugged in some way.
Looks to me like a case of trial and error file moving to solve the dependancy. One wonders if there is a way of solving all dependancies quickly and with certainty?
can you tell me how you spin down the disk at all? The scsi_util command of QNX 4 that featured start and stop commands is not included in QNX 6. I want to spin down the disk after 30 minutes of inactivity.