Is PalmOS good for browsing lots of information?

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops (More info?)

"A. Gaggero" <wwwjesterit@yahoo.com> wrote in news:41120265.C36F1792
@yahoo.com:

> Palms equipped with external memory card allow to carry with you a lot
> of information....
> ... but when size of information grows it's difficult to manage it.
> Consider the following example (from real situation):
>
> I need to carry with me lots of plain ASCII text files (info files,
> Unix manual pages, emails, source and configuration files etc...). Just
> to give some numbers , consider the example of about 8000 files within
> 500 directories requiring 200 MBof memory. The whole tree of information
> can be zipped (or tar-gzipped) within a unique file sized 16MB.
> Working on the zip file, I'd like to be able to:
>
> - open and read any of the 8000 files
> - search files by name
> - search files containing a given string
>
> If I had a Zaurus, this would be easy by combining with pipes commands
> such as tar, gzip , find , grep etc...
>
> With PalmOS, it's more difficult. I've tried several compression
> programs but all of them failed to open the big zip file (a lot of them
> also crashed my Clie requiring a soft restart). I think (but I'm not
> sure) that using DOC readers (ie converting in some way the 8000 files
> and putting them in a unique DOC file of 16 Mb) also leads to same
> results.
> I know, Palms are not thinked to manage such big amounts of datas, but
> it's also true that the hardware I bought (200 Mhz processor, 32 Mb of
> ram, 256 Mb of memory of memory card) it's good enough to manage it....
> it's a software problem...
>
>
> How PalmOS can manage such a situation? Any idea?

Do all the files HAVE to be in one zip? I think you would be better off,
regardless of the OS, using more zips with fewer files in each, and you
wouldn't need a lot more space. Putting 8000 files in one zip just doesn't
make a lot of sense to me. It works, albeit slowly, on Windows because you
have the entire hard disk to use as virtual memory. On a Palm, you don't
have a hard disk, only the installed memory and the SD card. Card
transfers are very slow, especially compared to HD access, so using the
card for virtual memory isn't really a viable option. Thus, trying to open
a zip file that is larger than the installed memory, especially when
unzipped, is asking for problems. Trying to search this big zip isn't
impossible, but it will take a long, long time, because of the slow card
access.

I don't think this is a software issue, it's a hardware issue. You're
expecting far too much.

--
Regards,

Stan