Re: Hardware platform needed for Forms4 under Windows

In article <Apr.21.14.31.38.1994.11174_at_andromeda.rutgers.edu> holowcza_at_andromeda.rutgers.edu (Richard D Holowczak) writes:
>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.

Excuse me, but that is a C developer's machine. A Forms programmer would need a 486 with 16 MB to get reasonably good performance. More memory would be nice, but isn't essential at all unless you are using Reports and Graphics designers simlutaneously with the Forms designer. Fast hard disk is not essential, but I wouldn't want to load the .EXE/.DLLs/.etc from a network drive either!

For the swap file, I believe we've found that a large FIXED SIZED swap file is ***MUCH*** slower than temporary (per process) swap files on Windows, especially after running for a while. This is probably because of Windows' horrible garbage-collection/fragmentation-reduction.

Hope this helps ... Dennis Moore

> 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 Sat Apr 23 1994 - 20:12:27 CEST