Hi Craig,

>How much effect does setting the foreground and background memory actually have?
>and what is an ideal setting?

This setting specifies how much memory VFP allocates at max for caching data. This includes index blocks, Rushmore bitmaps, etc. but not result cursor, objects, etc. The difficulty is that VFP just requests memory from Windows, but this memory might be swapped out into the virtual memory file. If VFP needs more memory than SYS(3050) allow, it starts creating .TMP files. The ideal value would be all unused physical memory. However, this value changes every second. The other issue to compare is the speed of the drive where the window swap file sits and the one that is used by VFP. If the Windows swap file is faster, a larger value might make sense, otherwise it's better to keep it small.

There're few situation where you definitly MUST change SYS(3050). That's when you have more than 2 GB of RAM. In this case set SYS(3050) to a value much lower than that. The other situation is an application running on terminal services. The default would use too much memory for a shared server.

Christof