BDE Configuration Tips

Contributed by Liz McGuire
05 February 2002
A compilation of advice on setting those obscure "INIT" settings in the BDE (compiled by Liz). BDE Configuration Suggestions Compiled by Liz McGuire Introduction Nearly every Paradox user eventually wants to know what to do with those obscure "INIT" settings in the BDE. The following is a compilation of advice from folks on the Paradox newsgroups - take it for what it's worth. (I could not find any explanation on why the recommendations are what they are.) Random Notes From The Groups SHAREDMEMLOCATION: I've seen Bertil recommend setting this to 5BDE on Windows 2000 machines. Bertil responded that if one can run two or more instances of Paradox 8/9/10 on a Windows 2000 machine without setting the SHAREDMEMLOCATION to 5BDE, then you can ignore this setting. On Borland's BDE newsgroup, I've seen them recommend setting this to 6BDE under Windows XP (if you are having out of memory problems). (I haven't tested either setting.) MAXFILEHANDLES: I've seen recommendations to lower the value in this setting. Bertil replies: "I have often recommended to lower MAXFILEHANDLES if you run into problems with files not being released properly, especially after import/export. This was an issue in P5 and maybe early releases of P7.32. I don't know if it valid any longer." From Rick Kelly: "I changed MEMSIZE to 84 and SHAREDMEMSIZE to 28672 on a 128MB NT4 sp6a workstation running on a Novell 5.1 LAN. All forms, reports, etc running locally and tables on the server and noticed a significant improvement. Several complex forms (P9RT/SP3) involving about 10 tables with 4-6 tcursors loaded in 1 sec vs 5 sec before. All other BDE settings were installation defaults with the exception of MAXFILEHANDLES = 96." (later addition: MINBUFSIZE (2048) and MAXBUFSIZE (8192).) From Brian Bushay: "I would leave maxfilehandles at its default of 40 Make sure minBuffsize is at least 1 meg. getting MinBuffsize to one meg is the only thing I have found that makes much difference. MaxBufsize 8-16 meg Here is general rule of thumb for memsize 1) Take the total amount of RAM on the machine and subtract 16MB for NT or 8MB for Win95. 2) With the remaining amount of RAM, set MEMSIZE to 3/4 of the amount and SHAREDMEMSIZE to 1/4 of the amount. For example : If you had a 64MB machine running NT you would start with 48MB (64-16) and set : MEMSIZE = 36 (48 * .75) SHAREDMEMSIZE = 12288 (48 * .25)" From J. Eric Taylor: BDE Administrator Configuration Settings Use the default settings where the column is blank in this document. CONFIGURATION TAB System \| Init \| Definition 64 MG 32 MG 128 MG 256 MG 96 MG 80 MG AUTO ODBC FALSE DATA REPOSITORY DEFAULT DRIVER PARADOX LANGDRIVER ANSI LOCAL SHARE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE LO MEM USE LIMIT 32 32 32 32 32 32 MAXBUFSIZE 16384 8192 32768 65536 24576 20480 MAXFILESHANDLES 100 100 100 100 100 100 MEMSIZE 42 18 90 192 66 54 MINBUFSIZE 4096 4096 4096 4096 4096 4096 MTS POOLING FALSE SHAREDMEMLOCATION SHAREDMEMSIZE 14080 6016 30000 61056 22016 18048 SQLQRYMODE SYSFLAGS 0 VERSION 4.0 CONFIGURATION TAB Configuration \| Drivers \| Native \| Paradox BLOCK SIZE 16384 FILL FACTOR 95 LEVEL 7 CONFIG.SYS Settings for Windows 95/98 Files=100 Buffers=80,0 FCBS=40,4 Stacks=32,512 Break=On LastDrive=Z What Liz picked up from these and other sources Various now out of print books on Paradox support the above recommendations and I could find nothing opposed to them, nor could I find anything which offered significantly more information. Thanks Thanks to Bertil Isberg, Rick Kelly, J. Eric Taylor, Stacy Rowley and Robert Harder for replying on the groups and/or sending me information. Thanks to Brian Bushay, Mike Irwin, Richard Davis, Dan Richardson and the authors of Paradox books which discuss configuring the BDE for providing some of the info that was sent to me.
Last Updated ( 20 September 2005 )

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