>>How do I calculate nYourValue? I mean, if its in the background, its not very important to me, I don't put VFP into the background when I am running a big process. Will it have other effects?
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>Calculate? I don't see how one can calculate it. It shouldn't be more than the free available memory anyway, if you want VFP to not use virtual memory on disk. This you can calculate. Reboot your computer, check the available memory (or the used memory and substract it from the installed memory). Bingo. Obviously, any other task that is started after that will also take some memory.
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The problem of course is that free available memory will shift over time as the workload on the system changes. If your app uses much automation, so that things like Word and Excel, or IE objects, load up, then you want to make sure that VFP hasn't already eaten their resources as well. Profiling system resource use over time will help find good median values - NT's Performance Monitor is a very useful tool here. The problem is determining which of the many metrics are most useful...

>But it really depends on your needs for your specific applications.
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>The background value is important because VFP grabs any available memory, even if it doesn't really need it immediately. So, if you want to limit the amount of memory used by VFP because you want to allow other app to have some real (not disk) memory, you should set this value too.
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VFP by default sets this value lower than the default foreground value (I think at 1/4 foreground - on a 128MB system with too much swap file here at home, the defaults are 82051072 and 20709376 respectively).