Newbie poll: GUI building in Python

[JanC]

Andrei <see at my.signature.com> schreef:

>>       When I run this (on Win98), it sucks up a gigantic wad of systme
>> resources -- my little resource monitor utility indicates that
>> Boa takes about 30-40%.  I have never used any program that takes 
>> anywhere close to this much.  Is this just part of the deal, or is there 
>> some trick I'm missing to get it to be less of a resource hog?

> With the latest CVS version, it takes about 3 seconds to load and uses
> ~30 Mb of memory on my system (Athlon 2k+/512Mb/WinXP). Delphi 4 uses
> ~20 Mb, so 30Mb for Boa it seems quite acceptable.

"Windows resources" has nothing to do with "normal" memory usage.

Windows 9x reserves a *fixed* part of the system's memory for keeping API 
data structures.  Fixed means that you can't change the size of that memory 
area and that it has the same size on a 16 MiB system as on a system with 1 
GiB of RAM.  There are 3 categories of these resources: "system", "user"  
and "GDI" (graphics/GUI).  When one of them gets out of space, Windows 
simply crashes.  :-(

A certain program might use 500 MiB of RAM but only 1% of "resources", 
while another program is no more than 150 KiB, but crashes the system by 
consuming 30% of system resources when you have only 25% left.

The "resource monitor" utility shows the remaining free space for the 3 
types of resources.  If you don't like system crashes, it's always a good 
idea to keep an eye on it when using Win9x...

BTW: Windows NT (including 2K/XP) has no fixed limit on these resources, so 
there you won't see this problem.

-- 
JanC

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