Documentation for Quick Index 1.0
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(C) 1989 by Darek Mihocka and Ignac Kolenko

April 8, 1989

Quick Index runs on any ST, color or mono.


Quick Index - the ST System Performance Evaluation Program
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Ever wondered how fast your ST is? With the different versions of 
TOS, and all of the dozens of TOS "hooks" already available (e.g. 
GDOS, Turbo ST),  almost every ST system is unique. And soon, the 
16 MHz boards and the Atari TT will be available.

With all these different ST systems, the time has arrived for a 
benchmarking program to evaluate the efficiency of these STs.

Quick Index measures the speed of 5 different parts of the ST:
     - CPU
     - VT52 text output
     - GEM dialog boxes 
     - GEMDOS file creation
     - raw disk DMA sector I/O

To run Quick Index, double click on the file QUIKDEX.PRG. When the 
main dialog box appears, click on the GO! button. The 5 tests will 
start. After about one or two minutes, the results of the tests 
will be printed beside the 5 categories.

By selecting which drive to test, you can measure the relative
efficiency of various disk drives.

As a reference, we used a stock 520ST with a single sided floppy 
disk and color monitor (in low resolution). Such a system will 
show speeds of 100% in each of the 5 categories. Other systems
we used for comparison were 520STs and 1040ST with TOS 1.2 and 1.4
installed, with and without Quick ST, Turbo ST, Deskcart, and GDOS.

Here is a sample of the kind of numbers we get:

CPU index: this should always be 100%, give or take 1%. A slower
           number indicates possible wait states of the ST's
           memory. A higher number should be expected when using
           an accelerator board.

BIOS text: this measures the efficiency of the BIOS text output
           function (i.e. the VT52 emulator). Depending on the
           version of TOS, this number will vary between 100% and
           about 150%. Using a software blitter, such as Turbo ST
           or our own Quick ST will result in numbers in the 300%
           range. We didn't have a real blitter to test with.

GEM draw:  This figure gives the relative speed of drawing the 
           Quick Index main dialog box 16 times, each time shifted
           over one pixel. TOS 1.4 is about 50% faster at doing this
           than TOS 1.0, although the blitter should be even quicker.
           With Atari's GDOS installed, the number drops below 100%!

GEMDOS I/O: This measures how efficient GEMDOS is at creating and
           deleting files. TOS 1.4 is supposed to do this quicker, 
           but we found that TOS 1.4 is actually slower when using
           the disk caching program provided with it! This probably
           due to the write-thru caching. TOS 1.4 with a hard disk
           still comes in at 1900%, while a RAMdisk is around 9000%!

DMA read:  This index shows how fast it takes to read the first 64K
           block of sectors from the given disk. A RAMdisk rates at
           over 10000% the speed of a floppy disk, which hard disks
           are in the 3000% range. This test can be used to determine
           the efficiency of various formatting techniques.

One interesting observation was that a double sided disk formatted
with DC Formatter scored 43 on the GEMDOS test, but 182% on the DMA
test. In other words, "twisted" disks may read faster but can still
cut down the speed of disk operations!


Quick Index is released as shareware, and 6th in the Quick family 
of shareware utilities. Your one $30 contribution entitles you to 
receive updates of all the Quick utilities. More information will 
be available in a few days in release 1.3 of the Quick software. 
New versions of Quick View, Quick Find, Quick Inf, Quick Print, 
and Quick Index will be included in that release.

Any comments or suggestions about Quick Index would be appreciated.

Check the ST libraries on Compuserve and GEnie for this release.