I figgur it's too late to change the GVM architecture; however, it seems to me that a good way to handle GVM storage would be to use a vfat file system image. That way, it'd be easy to manually install things by mounting the image and copying files to/from it. I run into a prob where GVM doesn't want to install files of formats it doesn't recognize, even when those files are needed by programs (I've had to setup Hotsync just to install these files). SD cards on the Palm are supported by vfat anyway.

On the other hand, I get the feeling that file system size in the GVM is limited by performance issues. I have one GVM image that has about 60MB stored on it, and it takes 60-120 seconds, and sometimes longer, just to start it. It seems that the more you install on the GVM image, the slower it starts. It makes me wonder if the GVM loads the entire image into some sort of dynamic memory before launching (bad).

In order just to install a minimum set of Palm apps., I've had to create 3 separate GVM stores (each launched by its own shortcut). This is a major kludge for several reasons, the greatest of which is that I cannot launch two GVM's at the same time. It makes it extremely inconvenient to use GVM for my PIM because stopping one GVM and starting another takes too long to simply enter an appointment.

The gvm launcher scans the whole gvm.store file whenever you start it, so yes, it's slow. But it's much faster to start a Palm application directly (there's another thread about that). And starting a Palm app is to start the actual emulator, and when in the emulator switching from one app to another is almost as fast as on a real Palm.

I pretty much have to launch my Palm apps from shortcuts because I am currently using three separate GVM stores (we had traded notes about this some months back). Still, a nearly fully loaded store takes 60-90 seconds to launch or shut down.

I should have mentioned that shutdown times are just as slow. This is what made me think that the GVM is writing to a cache and then writing back on exit. It would also seem to explain why on many occasions I have lost all the apps/data on a store when my N810 has crashed while the GVM was shutting down.

Here's one of the shortcuts I'm using:

Is there something in the command that causes a slow launch? I'd be grateful for any tips on optimizing the launch. Or am I experiencing slow launches because the app I'm launching (My Bible) had pdbs that total close to 60MB?

App switching in the emulator is about as fast as it is natively on the Palm. My prob is that with a fully loaded store, I cannot install additional apps, and I cannot quickly switch from one store to another because the launch and shutdown times are very slow. I should add that my other stores are much smaller, and they launch reasonably fast.

By the way, I find it easiest to manage the stores, that is attach the gvmlauncher to one, by using a symlink. I've named my stores gvm.store.0, etc., and I can easily switch the store attached to the launcher by doing something like:
This makes it easy to do things such as installing apps.

My guess is what you're suggesting - 60MB would take a while to load, even directly from the SD card. In this case it's going through the virtual image handling, which probably slows it down considerably (and is something that Access could possibly improve), and it also loads from the compressed filesystem of the internal flash. That's usually also slower than an SD card. Certainly much slower than a Class 6 SDHC card.

Have you tried to move the whole .gvm directory to a fast SD card? You could make a symlink from /media/mmc1/.gvm /home/user/.gvm, for example.

(Someone else mentioned a problem with symlinking the gvm store to a card, but I believe I tried the above with success, back with the first beta)

Thanks TA-t3. I tried putting the store on the internal card; however, that didn't seem to speed it up much. My external is relatively high speed. I also trimmed out about 12MB of applications from the store, and that seemed to speed things up quite a bit (about 30 second launch times). Mebbe there are diminishing returns as the store gets close to 64MB. For now, I think that my new setup will work quite nicely.

And I'd just to **stress** for others reading this thread that it's very important to backup your store(s). I have my own method, but there's a how-to somewhere here. My experience with GVM stores is that the frequency of catastrophic failure is related to the size of the store.

I haven't trusted the Active Sync restore on a Palm since experiencing 100% data loss when trying to restore via Active Sync back in the first days of the Palm III. From what I can see, Active Sync hasn't improved that much since then.

Thanks for reporting. I don't have that many applications installed myself, so I don't get to test the limitations on the performance much. Let's hope there will be a 3rd beta of GVM, with some improvements. Ah, how I wish that application could be open source.. I can see how it could be improved. Unfortunately this cannot happen in this case.

EDIT: BTW, I think you meant 'HotSync', not 'Active Sync'.. the latter is Microsoft's very poor hotsync lookalike, for PPC/Windows Mobile..

I'd pay for it, if they would commit to developing and supporting it... with the way they're updating it these days it doesn't look like it would be worth buying, though.

Well, I believe the current version expires November 30 2008 so maybe we can expect an updated version within the next 10 days?

Looks like another one is out, but it's not very impressive... They probably just did a rebuild to beat the expiration date.

Yikes! Still no SD support?!