Declined MEMORY and environment

[Stephen Howe]

Hi

I am a bit surprised that MEMORY does not display a line indicating the size of the current environment. But I guess

SET > r.txt

and looking at filesize gives some idea.

I have just had SQL Server 2005 Client-sided Tools installed, they have added more entries to the environment and now Brief fails to run.
I am going to have to run something that prunes the environment before running Brief :-(
And I already dislike the faded-blue query plan icons. Not a patch on QA for SQL Server 2000. Why do MS programmers feel a need to fiddle with everything? They were perfect before, they are ugly now.

Stephen Howe


Stephen Howe

 

[rconn]

Stephen Howe wrote:

> I am a bit surprised that MEMORY does not display a line indicating

> the size of the current environment. But I guess

>
> SET > r.txt
>
> and looking at filesize gives some idea.

There is no environment size as such in Windows -- the environment is
dynamically resized as necessary. (And in fact it's not possible for an
app to determine just how much space Windows has allocated for the
environment, only the amount of space that's currently being used.)

> I have just had SQL Server 2005 Client-sided Tools installed, they

> have added more entries to the environment and now Brief fails to run.

DOS apps are always going to have problems running from Windows; most
DOS apps think that 300-400 bytes is a large environment and 500 bytes
will crash them. If you have Java or MSVC installed you could be using
upwards of 8-10K worth of environment space.

Rex Conn
JP Software

 

[Stephen Howe]

Thanks Rex

There is no environment size as such in Windows -- the environment is
dynamically resized as necessary. (And in fact it's not possible for an
app to determine just how much space Windows has allocated for the
environment, only the amount of space that's currently being used.)

Then could it display the current size of the environment?

DOS apps are always going to have problems running from Windows; most
DOS apps think that 300-400 bytes is a large environment and 500 bytes
will crash them. If you have Java or MSVC installed you could be using
upwards of 8-10K worth of environment space.

Yeah. I now have a batch file which Unset's quite a few env variables and prunes PATH before kicking in with Brief. I remember the 16-bit DOS days when the environment was part of DGROUP.

Cheers

Stephen Howe

 

[Steve Fabian]

Stephen Howe wrote:
| Yeah. I now have a batch file which Unset's quite a few env variables
| and prunes PATH before kicking in with Brief. I remember the 16-bit
| DOS days when the environment was part of DGROUP.

You might use START /I /SEPARATE which would pass to Brief only the small
fragment of the environment from the Windows registry. BTW, my environment
is 4822 bytes, the longest variable is prompt (192 bytes long), and have no
problems running Brief. I use Vince Fatica's FSTOGGLE.EXE to run Brief in
80x50 full screen mode on my WinXP SP3 system. My only problem with Brief is
that on XP the macro compiler will not run, so I can no longer develop new
ones.
--
Steve