Hi Al,

>Very interesting. Are you actually running VFP apps that consume address space approaching 2GB?

No, I have tweaked the registry settings to get disk cache size > 2GB.
I have created a class which gives me estimates for 6 levels of restricting memory setting (similar to the process priority menu entries in W2K) depending mostly on physical and partly on available RAM the machine has. I usually run xBase-type code in restrictive memory, and on most housekeeping tasks like indexing, pack, copy and often on heavy SQL procesing I switch over to more than normal memory.

Is your issue related to address space usage, or just the presence of lots of RAM? (my understanding is the two are related, but different)

It seems to be related to the presence of large amounts of physical RAM. We have kept page file size fixed and small enough to stay under 4GB, so that should not be relevant. The "out of memory errors" happening sometimes with large amounts of RAM, small page files, large sys(3050) and systems so heavily taxed that the combined adress space is not enough we encountered a few year ago is definately not the problem. I will try some tweaking to get a better grip on the problem, but if everything fails we will start very soon to experiment with a 64-Bit Linux as BasicOS and small sized XP or W2K-VM's, W2K because there it is much easier to get a small footprint. For non-connected machines W98 without a virus scanner and no firewall might also be an option to run [mainly singlethreaded]taxing programs like vfp. I just hope all VM's remap their virtual OS filecache to the basic OS filecache and only one layer of virtual memory is used - but that is just a wild hope as I have not delved into VM's deeply yet.

Anybody care to comment on memory managment in such a case ? Links would help as well.

regards

thomas