Why is Arachne so slow on my PC ?
There’s a long list of methods how to speed Arachne up – that list is part of the documentation distributed together with Arachne. Because the list is quite long and confusing, let’s summarize it: You need at least a 33 Mhz processor to anything useful with Arachne. This usually means a 386 or 486 compatible CPU. You have to use some kind of disk cache (SMARTDRV, NWCACHE) or run Arachne from some kind of virtual disk – “RAM disk”. This totally disqualifies PCs with less than 2 MB of memory – on such hardware, you can use Arachne to occasionally view short HTML pages with few images, but don’t expect anything more. If you have only 2 MB, dedicate 512 KB for EMS or XMS, 512 KB for disk cache, and pray. If you want rather to read mail than view web pages, you should maybe allocate as big RAM disk as you can, point your %TEMP% enviroment variable to it and let Arachne “swap to disk” and cache local objects to %TEMP% directory. Of course, it is optimal to have all three accelerators: lot of
