Re: Hardware platform needed for Forms4 under Windows

Glenn_at_wplace.demon.co.uk (Glenn Nicholas) writes:

[stuff deleted]
>I am aware that Oracle recommend a 486 with 16Mb of RAM as the minimum
>configuration. How does this minimum configuration operate in an actual
>development and production environment? I have heard that some products
>can take a long time to launch.
 

>Is disk access speed a critical factor, or is it RAM? What happens with
>the runtime products when you call a report from a form, or call a graphics
>module from a form?

  This is a big grey area because of the way MS Windows can use   virtual memory. Here's the deal. If you set up Windows properly,   you can set aside an area of disk space called a Swapfile. When an    application tries to allocate more memory and there is no physical   memory left, Windows can swap code segments from memory to the swap file   freeing up some physical RAM for the allocation.

  As you can guess, this can slow things down quite a bit.

  The tricky part is, software companies can get away with saying:   "Our Word Processor / Database / Development Environment only     needs X megabytes of RAM to run. For example, WordPerfect makes this    claim about the newest Windows product. If you run it with this    minimal configuration, it's Swap City :)

  I would not buy a PC today with less than 16 megs of RAM for any   purpose. It's simply not worth the extra hassle of adding more   RAM later.

  When I was at IOUG this Fall, I asked one of the Oracle guys what   he uses back at the shop to do his Forms and Reports demos. At the   time he had a fast 486 with 48 Megs of RAM and 1 Gig of disk space.

  I'm not suggesting this is what you need but today, this machine   does not cost all that much. If you're looking to get half   a dozen of them (as we are here), this is the direction to go in.   

Hope this helps.

Rich Holowczak
Rutgers University
holowcza_at_andromeda.rutgers.edu

>Glenn Nicholas, Concept
>glenn_at_wplace.demon.co.uk
Received on Thu Apr 21 1994 - 20:31:38 CEST