Since AREXX is going to be included in the 1.4 version of the operating
system, people were wondering what the effect might be of there being
a large number of public message ports hanging around, particularly since
the system does a Forbid() while searching the list. A tree was suggested,
as well as a self-organizing list. Forunately, it was pretty easy to write
a quick hack to change the search strategy. This program patches Exec to
make FindPort and AddPort do hashing.
	Everything seems to work fine. One side effect is that programs which
scan through the port list (like XOPER or wack) to give you a list of
what ports are active won't work any more. SO I also wrote a program
"DumpPorts" which understands the hashing (and will give an idea of how well
the hashing function is working).
	To install, simply type "FastPort". After this, you can do a "DumpPorts".

	This still does a forbid() while searching. It might be an improvement to
use a semaphore instead. In fact, since there are 32 different hash chains,
there could be a semaphore for each one. This would make it pretty damn
unlikely that any program would ever have to wait.


	Chris.