Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On 1/20/2014, Silver Slimer posted:
On Mon, 20 Jan 2014 18:18:56 -0500, Gene E. Bloch
wrote:

That's complete bull**** unless you use the Metro interface
exclusively. There, it allows you to have two Metro UI windows
side-by-side but all of those applications run in full-screen only
so it kind of makes sense that you can only fit two. If you use the
Desktop (in other words, the traditional Windows inteface), you can
have a million of them open if you so desire.

I think the actual limit is 291,732 windows open. You are definitely
exaggerating.

I agree. I've had no trouble opening any number of windows in the
Desktop that I've wanted to (and of course, I pay close attention to
that 291,732-window limit).

Is there an actual limit? I'm curious now.

My guess would be no. Just keep opening windows until your computer
starts to vaporize.

More seriously: Somewhere along the line there will be no memory left to
allocate or performance will begin to suffer - or both.

As for a fixed limit: my guess above could easily be wrong. (You knew
that!)


I could find several threads on the topic, but one answer here covers
a few possible limitations. Apparently, it's a desktop heap setting
that has the most effect. And there is a registry key where on older
OSes, you could adjust the allocation slightly. Still, in all the
threads where I've seen limits suggested, they suggested a rather
small number of windows. If would really depend, on whether modern OSes
removed the desktop heap design, as to whether that had changed or not.

http://www.vistax64.com/vista-genera...n-windows.html

For you programmer types, all it would take is a certain
one-line script, recursive, to test this :-) I'll wait
for the howls of the first victim.

When someone did that to a Unix machine at work (by accident,
they tell me), the machine became inaccessible and had to be
power cycled. We couldn't wait long enough to see if it
would be possible to stop it somehow - the admin was there
as well, invited for a good chuckle at the victims expense.
Couldn't telnet in, couldn't enter commands, etc. It's
known as a "fork bomb".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb

Windows won't go that way, because it'll run out of
windows first :-) Before it runs out of PIDs. It's
probably got enough file handles as well. So maybe the
reason for a low windows limit, is defensive in nature.

Paul