Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!chx400!bernina!bernina!neeri From: neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Ulrich Neeracher) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Why should appl be limited to 100 Mb? Message-ID: Date: 30 May 91 15:38:35 GMT References: <1544@nih-csl.nih.gov> Sender: news@bernina.ethz.ch (USENET News System) Organization: Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH, Zurich Lines: 29 In-Reply-To: Vivino@NIHDCRT's message of 30 May 91 12:18:31 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: etzj-gw In article <1544@nih-csl.nih.gov> Vivino@NIHDCRT (Mark Vivino) writes: >Does anyone happen to know why applications are limited to 100 megabytes >under system 7? >If you try and change the suggested size to more than that it'll tell you >not to do it. It's not something that needs to be done lots for a home use >computer, but say you have 10,000 medical images, or run a library catalog >system or anything with lots of data and you want it available fairly >fast. It would be a useful feature to not limit the application size to >100 Mb. Are you sure the limit is *100* Mb ? Under earlier versions, it was 10 Mb. While 10M is too strict a limit, 100M is a lot of memory. Nobody will have so much RAM (Well, at least not for the next 2 years, until the 64M chips go into mass production). Personally, I don't even have 100M of *Hard Disk* space. Even if you have 100M of spare Hard Disk space for virtual memory, I don't think you'll have a significant performance gain over a clever disk caching scheme (That's what B-Trees are for). Out of curiosity, I checked the maximal process size on our various UN*X machines. For two machines, it was around 32M, for one 10M and for one 256M. Matthias BTW: One reason for this limitation could be that the mac is "limited" to 128M of real memory, I believe. Is this correct ? ----- Matthias Neeracher neeri@iis.ethz.ch "These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness." -- William Gibson, _Johnny Mnemonic_