LP>>> FILES=20

 HR>> Should at least 90

 SH> Why? I've never had a problem. Besides, if you get a DOS app that
 SH> needs more, just change it for that specific VDM.

Yes, you my change it for each DOS/Win program separatly. But it's better to
have a more practical value as default. You would omit some unwanted problems.

You can do this under MDOS painless because MDOS presents you more lower (and
upper) memory as each standalone DOS can do.

 SH> No need to chew memory needlesly.

 LP>>> SWAPPATH=d:\ 4096 10240
 HR>> 20480 10240

 SH> I don't think that (the first value) needs to be set quite that
 SH> high. I've got mine at 16MeB's right now, which should give me
 SH> plenty of time to start killing errant apps before I overflow.

It should be quite higher. Because this is the point OS/2 will warn you if the 
FREE room on disk containing swapper.dat sinks under that limit. On an I386/16 
and old, slow disks 2M was enough. On a PII it will you let STOP the system
before you can see a warning. If you swapper is on a (logical disk) with a lot 
of free place let the system the chance to warn you before it has to stop.

In case of low memory OS/2 does nothing as to swap out until the disk is full. 
If the disk is full and the swapper can't grow the stystem stops hard.

If the free space on disk shrinks below the warn limit a separate thread is
started to warn you for that situation and give you the chance to end or kill
some applications to make room in virtual addresspace to continue.

If the limit is too small the growing process goes on an the system my stop
before you can ever seen the warning. It is not enough to *see* the warning
*you* need time to register it, check the running processes, save pending data 
in your applications..... Therefore you need any second the system can give
you at this moment. There is nothing that will stop the forthgoing allocation
after the appears other than YOU. It is only on you to break that by ending
all well behaved applications or killing the one that does illegal consumes
the memory.

OS/2 can address 4GB RAM - and if not enough real RAM is available it tries to 
use disk space instead. On a modern processor with modern disks this can be 1
GB/s. If you disk (the swapper resides) is big enough to fit the whole 4GB
addressroom you'll never see the warning. If not it depends on the memory your 
applications can use. You're right if you think this can never occure on your
system - but in an unwanted ituation it my occure. It is nothing than a last
chance to hold your system running in a purly seldom situation.

I've got here a PII 450 with 256 MB RAM + up to 600 MB free room for swapper - 
but can find quickly a situation where the system goes out of memory and stops 
without any warning - if I not set the warn limit high enough.

 SH> Then again, I've got a swapfile and drivespace monitor on my WPS,
 SH> so I'd be an idiot to miss the bars moving up and down
 SH> respectively :>

Hi, hi. The monitor can't warn you right. If YOU're busy you dont look on it.
If the system has to warn you it will do it dramatically - a VIO fullscreen
session appears with highest priority - and you have to swith back to your
applications to do something.


 LP>>> THREADS=256
 HR>> 512

 SH> Again - why? I'm at 256 and have never once come close to running
 SH> out, and I've even tried. :>

Inside the system is a limited area of management data. This area is created
during boot time and can't grow. The Thread-/processes table is one of them.

The parameter threads includes ALL: any process (per se 1 thread,
any thread that can started from an process, and all modern apps are
multithreaded and most of them starts multiple threads on demand.

You should not run hard on any limit because if you're always near that you my 
quickly run out of it. Some application doesn't check all and every error.
Thereby normally a thread start goes well. But if threads is to small it fails 
- and the application too. Do you like to lose data?

All three parameters make your system savelier. They help you to work well in
case of low resources.



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