[DUG] D2010 and XE on the same machine

[Paul Heinz]

Hi Jeremy 

> the HEX is c3000

OK - that's the standard Windows XP SP2 value. You're fine.

On some machines, especially HP laptops and desktops, you'll find the
value is hex 0xffffffff (i.e. -1) which is a BAD thing since it means
'allocate as many system pages as possible at the expense of paged pool
and file system cache'. 

What is especially nasty about this setting is that the more physical
RAM you have, the more system pages it takes and the worse it gets. We
found performance actually got worse on the HP laptops when we went from
2Gb to 4Gb thinking that insufficient RAM was the issue.

Delphi performs really poorly with big projects if you have lots of
directories in your Delphi library path since the file system cache
can't keep the directory pages in the file system cache and Delphi does
incredible amounts of directory entry lookups via GetFileAttributesEx
calls.

Interestingly, reading between the lines, hooking those calls and using
a private in-memory hashtable cache is some of what the IDEfixpack seems
to be doing to speed up Code Insight.

Cheers,
  Paul.