Re: Forms on windows

Sybrand Bakker wrote:
> Windows isn't a scalable O/S.

I beg to disagree somewhat. Windows is an OS with somewhat limited scalability. So long as your application doesn't reach those limits you will scale perfectly acceptably.

What I mean by this is that Windows has some limitations (and the 2/3gb of addressable RAM per process is definitely one of these). However if you are serving (say) 10 concurrent users and you wish to scale to 100 concurrent users the likelihood is that Windows will do this (this is obviously application dependent). If you wish to scale to 10,000 concurrent users Windows (probably) won't do this.

Now I know that all applications that are currently being developed allegedly require 99.999% availability for 10,000 concurrent users with sub 1sec response times for all queries, but a realistic appraisal of what you actually require will help you decide whether windows is right for you or not.

In answer to the OP, as delivered each process on windows can by default address only 2gb of RAM (and windows will only use 4gb RAM). This *can* severely limit Oracle since all Oracle's background and foreground processes are implemented as threads for the same process (Oracle.exe) on windows. This is especially true if you chase a good CacheHit ratio and use the old fashioned SORT_AREA_SIZE and HASH_AREA_SIZE parameters to control memory allocation for foreground processes as it becomes remarkably easy to run out of RAM. You can modify this limit from 2gb to 3gb pretty easily by using a feature of windows on Intel x86 processors called 4GB Ram Tuning. You can modify it still further by using Address Windowing Extensions - but this is really a nasty kludge.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dngenlib/html/awewindata.asp has the details.

All of the following assumes you are talking about 32bit windows and not 64bit windows.

Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com Received on Mon Nov 15 2004 - 15:57:32 CET