[comp.sys.mac.programmer] Why should appl be limited to 100 Mb?

Vivino@NIHDCRT (Mark Vivino) (05/30/91)

Does anyone happen to know why applications are limited to 100 megabytes 
under system 7?
If you try and change the suggested size to more than that it'll tell you 
not to do it. It's not something that needs to be done lots for a home use 
computer, but say you have 10,000 medical images, or run a library catalog 
system or anything with lots of data and you want it available fairly 
fast. It would be a useful feature to not limit the application size to 
100 Mb.

Do we wait for system 8?

Mark Vivino
mvivino@helix.nih.gov

neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Ulrich Neeracher) (05/30/91)

In article <1544@nih-csl.nih.gov> Vivino@NIHDCRT (Mark Vivino) writes:
>Does anyone happen to know why applications are limited to 100 megabytes 
>under system 7?
>If you try and change the suggested size to more than that it'll tell you 
>not to do it. It's not something that needs to be done lots for a home use 
>computer, but say you have 10,000 medical images, or run a library catalog 
>system or anything with lots of data and you want it available fairly 
>fast. It would be a useful feature to not limit the application size to 
>100 Mb.

Are you sure the limit is *100* Mb ? Under earlier versions, it was 10 Mb.
While 10M is too strict a limit, 100M is a lot of memory. Nobody will have
so much RAM (Well, at least not for the next 2 years, until the 64M chips
go into mass production). Personally, I don't even have 100M of *Hard Disk*
space. Even if you have 100M of spare Hard Disk space for virtual memory,
I don't think you'll have a significant performance gain over a clever
disk caching scheme (That's what B-Trees are for).
   Out of curiosity, I checked the maximal process size on our various UN*X
machines. For two machines, it was around 32M, for one 10M and for one 256M.

Matthias

BTW: One reason for this limitation could be that the mac is "limited" to
     128M of real memory, I believe. Is this correct ?

-----
Matthias Neeracher                                      neeri@iis.ethz.ch
   "These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can 
    even aspire to crudeness." -- William Gibson, _Johnny Mnemonic_

francis@arthur.uchicago.edu (Francis Stracke) (05/31/91)

In article <1544@nih-csl.nih.gov> Vivino@NIHDCRT (Mark Vivino) writes:

   Does anyone happen to know why applications are limited to 100 megabytes 
   under system 7?
   If you try and change the suggested size to more than that it'll tell you 
   not to do it. It's not something that needs to be done lots for a home use 

   Do we wait for system 8?

I believe this came up before, and the answer was to manipulate the
SIZE resource by hand.

--
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REEKES@applelink.apple.com (Jim Reekes) (06/01/91)

In article <1544@nih-csl.nih.gov>, Vivino@NIHDCRT (Mark Vivino) writes:
> 
> Does anyone happen to know why applications are limited to 100 megabytes 
> under system 7?


This is only a limitation of the "Get Info" dialog window of the Finder.
You can open the SIZE resource yourself and change the memory partition.

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