mitsu@well.UUCP (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) (08/05/89)
I love Windows, but for years I've cursed it's inability to run a lot of copies of an application, even on a 386 machine with plenty of memory. At the same time I noticed that even as it failed to run another copy of a particular application, it would be happy to run several copies of a DIFFERENT app. This just seemed weird and unpredictable, but I just thought, well, that's the way it is; you need OS/2 to get more reasonable behavior. Then I got a copy of hDC Windows Manager which has a nice graphical memory display utility, and my suspicions grew. It reported that my application (call it Z) only took up something like 5K of conventional memory, and even though I might have a meg of expanded left, it wouldn't run another copy of Z! Yet it would go ahead and run ten copies of Write, or whatever. What was the deal here? It finally hit me: what if I COPIED THE EXECUTABLE and tried to run THAT? It seemed to be happy to run OTHER APPLICATIONS, what if it THOUGHT it was running ANOTHER APPLICATION? Well, I copied Z several times (Z1, Z2, Z3, etc.) Ran Z four times. The fifth time, no go. Well, I said, take THIS! I ran Z1. It ran. Tried it again. It ran again. A total of three times. Z3 ran four times. And so on. All in all I managed to get FOURTEEN COPIES of "Z" running before I gave up. When it ran out of EMS, it dutifully swapped to disk, just as I'd always thought it should. The moral is: if you have an EMS-equipped machine with backfilled EMS mapping area and you want to run many copies of a given app, try copying the application and when you can't run another with the same name, run another one with a different name. Believe it or not, this works, though kludgy. I wish Microsoft would fix this, and just let Windows load another copy of the thing when it runs out of space (instead of simply failing, causing endless despair and confusion.)