patrickd@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick Deupree) (04/09/90)
In article <261D02BF.4067@deimos.cis.ksu.edu> jsp@phobos.cis.ksu.edu (Jeff S. Pihl) writes: >It's true that the .IMA file is about 200k, but the executiable necessary >to run the .IMA is another 120k. So any program that I could distribute >will take up over 300k of disk space. Sure, this is true but if I remember correctly Excel and Pagemaker take somewhere along the lines of 800K of disk space for the executable. (Thank god for disposable segments, eh?) >Furthermore, it will take over 300k of memory to run. Thus making it >difficult to run any other application concurrently. I am posting this to >the news group to inform prospective buyers of this aspect of Actor. >If anyone buys Actor with the hope of writing little utility programs, >they will be as dissapointed as I. > Ok. Lets try this again. Actor will NOT take over 300K to run trivial apps. Believe me. I've worked with this system for over a year, developed part of it, heard people phone in with their problems and it does NOT take over 300K to run. I guess I'll give my "Basics of Actor memory management" speech again. Actor is composed of a few parts. Here's a little table of the memory that is taken up by Actor: Actor Kernel -> 64K Actor Object Table -> 64K Windows Resources -> (trivial app) maybe 5K at most Static Memory -> (trivial app) 30K (and that's high) Dynamic Memory -> (trivial app) 5K x 2 (10K) Total -> 173K This will, of course, vary depending on what the "trivial app" is going to do, but that is how much memory Actor will take in the system, not over 300K. I Now, the one trick to all of this is that all this memory (with the exception of the Windows Resources) has to be in one contiguous block of memory. Occasionally Windows will tell you it has 300+ K to run something in, but that memory is not one contiguous block and Actor will complain. This has ONLY happened on a FEW computers running Windows 386, and this problem can almost always be solved by running Windows 386 in /n mode (something that quite a few Windows products I've seen REQUIRE, such as MicroGraphix Designer). Now, considering the fact that I can create a program to pop up a "Hello World" Window in 1 minute with Actor, the large program size for these small programs is a small price to pay. Heck, in 10 minutes in my hotel room Seattle I created a window that takes a bitmap resource and puts it in its client area, also taking care of resizing the bitmap to fit the window if it's resized as well. this isn't bad. I really like to see responses from customers so keep on posting them. Just please excuse me if I correct a thing or two. @:) >Don't get me wrong, If you plan to write large, complex applications, >Actor is FANTASTIC!! Actor is FANTASTIC no matter what you're developing. @:) -- "Organized fandom is composed of a bunch of nitpickers with a thing for trivial pursuit." -Harlan Ellison Patrick Deupree -> patrickd@chinet.chi.il.us