Hi Kevin,

SYS(3050) specifies the maximum amount of memory that VFP allocates for caching, eg. for Rushmore bitmaps, the table cache and the like. If VFP needs more memory than that for a single operation like a SELECT statement, it starts swapping.

Other memory usage is not limited by SYS(3050). For example, memory used for table-buffering, objects, etc. is only limited by the amount of physical and virtual memory on that machine. This is called handle pool memory.

I can't say which of both memory areas are used by the report. But if you set SYS(3050) too high, you would notice that users who log on first have good performance, but others have bad performance because the first ones get physical memory while the others might only get temporary files. Eventually you would receive an "Out of memory" error message for the users who log on later. OTOH, if the value is too low, disk activity increases and VFP slows down.

SYS(3050) takes its memory from the avilable Windows memory (virtual+phyiscal memory) and therefore competes with the handle pool memory. If SYS(3050) actually allocated a lot of memory and Windows can't provide virtual memory, other memory allocations for variables, reports, fonts, the printer driver, etc. might fail even though there's a lot of physical memory available.

I can't tell you what is best for you, but reducing SYS(3050) might at worst reduce the speed of large SELECT commands, because VFP starts swapping even though lots of memory is still available. Increasing it, OTOH, might cause a system wide low memory situation if many users execute large SELECT statements and therefore actually allocated all of their SYS(3050) memory.

Christof