Microsoft Word visionfs

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From: proORGA-Leimen@t-online.de (Peter)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc,comp.unix.unixware.misc
Subject: Re: VisonFS3.00.925 and WinWord2000 trouble, Answer from SCO
Date: Tue, 02 May 2000 10:08:23 GMT
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I have now reproduced your problem with Word 2000 and engineering has
isolated the cause of the delay in opening the .txt files. I had been
opening the file from within Word, rather than opening the file
directly
with an association linked to Word, which is why I didn't see the
problem
before.

Engineering has taken a look at this problem and found the following
behaviour occurring:

Looking at a network trace of the open, what Word 2000 appears to be
doing
is looking for a number of converter files. The actual sequence of
calls
goes something like:

  win: give me info on \dir
  vfs: info about \dir
  win: give me info on \dir
  vfs: info about \dir
  win: give me info about \dir\somefile.doc
  vfs: \dir\somefile.doc not found

The names of somefile.doc vary, but examples are WrdPrfctDat50.doc,
MSWordMac51.doc and Lotus123.doc. When I say 'a number', the above
sequence
of calls is repeated more than 180 times. The more files there are in
a
directory, the longer its going to take for VisionFS to [not] find a
particular file. Opening a .doc file instead doesn't experience the
same
delays as it interprets the file a "native" document, so it doesn't
look for
converter files.

The delay is coming from Word trying to open all the converter files.
Removing the text converter feature from Office did reduce the number
of
repetitions of the above sequence to about 20 in our tests, so you
might
want to try that to reduce the time it takes to open the .txt files.
The
best solution however, would be to not use Word 2000 to open
non-native
files, open the file from within an already running instance of Word
2000,
since it doesn't appear to search for converters in this fashion, or
go back
to using a previous version of Word that doesn't exhibit this problem.
Nothing can really be done from a VisionFS perspective.

In regards to your long file copy times, testing. shows that the
'preparing
to copy' phase involves Windows asking for details
(size/dates/attributes/...) of each file in turn. This then requires
VisionFS to stat() each file, which is an expensive operation. So, the
more
file you have in a directory, the larger number of stat() calls are
made,
the longer this is going to take to 'prepare to copy'.

There aren't really any standard times. Basically - the more files in
a
directory there are, the longer most operations are going to take.
There are
a number of other factors that could be involved here, such as network
speed, congestion and unnecessary protocol overhead, Unix
cpu/disk/memory
load, etc. Most versions of VisionFS have had some sort of improvement
in
this area in the past. There has been quite a lot of speed-up work
done for
VisionFS 3.1, due June/July, so I'd suggest you evaluate that release
when
it comes out.


Hope this help.

Cheers,

SCO Technical Support

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