Short: Brutally remove small mem frags on 040/060 systems (+src) Author: bernie@shock.cosmos.it (Bernardo Innocenti) Uploader: bernie shock cosmos it (Bernardo Innocenti) Type: util/boot Architecture: m68k-amigaos Use the included AvailFrag program or a system monitor such as Scout or XOper to determine if your system memory list has many small holes of 8 to 256 bytes each. Lots of small chunks are usually made by badly written programs (not freeing all the memory they allocated). On systems equipped with 68040 or 68060 the program SetPatch will load the 68060.library 68040.library at boot time. These libraries will setup the MMU page descriptors to cover all addressable memory space, including space reserved by Zorro boards. Unfortunately, the 040/060 MMUs require an 512-byte alignament for the descriptors, even if they only take up 256 bytes. So they free up the remaining 256 bytes in order to give some memory back to the system. On my Amiga 4000, which is fitted with four Zorro boards, this leaves more than 500 memory chunks right after booting the system! Such a fragmented memory list will slow down all AllocMem() and FreeMem() calls because they need to scan almost the entire list before they can reach the first memory chunk bigger than 256 byte. Put AllocFrags anywhere in your Startup-Sequence after SetPatch. It will remove from the memory list any chunks whose size is equal or smaller than 256 bytes. Using AllocFrags frequently during your normal system activity is not a good idea because it might cause even more fragmentation in your memory list once you close a program and it frees a memory block which was contiguous to one already removed by AllocFrags. I admit AllocFrags is a real hack and it WILL stop working when the OS memory allocation engine is changed (e.g.: to accomodate virtual or protected memory). Anyway, I'm sure that AllocFrags on OS 2.0 upto 3.1 will not cause any incompatibilities or system crashes. Inspect the source code if you don't believe me.