I thought I should report that AutoSave slows down pretty severely when the
log gets big on a machine with a relatively slow hard drive. In WPX, I was
using a four-year old Toshiba 100MHz Pentium notebook. The hard drive is
pretty slow on this machine compared to state-of-the-art notebooks. Reponse
using WL was excellent in all respects except when the log got over about
2000 QSOs and would get flushed to disk. It turned out that the delay
sending "TU WC1M" with the W5XD+ outboard keyer was just enough for the log
to get saved withiout interfering with operating, but I could see that once
I got over about 2500 QSOs the delay would be too long. Luckily (sort of),
the contest ended for me just short of that. I tried my 3K QSO log from
ARRLDX on that machine and the AutoSave was too slow to be practical.
The only solution I can see to this is to turn off AutoSave, but that makes
me nervous -- especially with a large log in memory. I suppose the delay is
primarily caused by flushing the entire log to disk. Any chance record I/O
could be implemented so that only the changes would have to be written?
73, Dick WC1M
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