Re: Increasing GDI Object Limits

From: EMS Solutions (EMSSolutions_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 07/29/04 

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 02:50:21 -0700

Thanks to everyone for the replies. Hard to know who is right or wrong, all I can go with is my observations. Based on some more testing today, what Robert stated seems to be consistent with my environment (Windows 2000 Professional Desktop, PIII 750, 512MB RAM).

If I fire up a few of the GDI hungry apps, flick between the many screens available within the application and watch the GDI handles grow and grow, you can guarantee a serious GDI failure at around 10,000 GDI handles. Every time! That's a pretty firm limit in my book.

Tomorrow I hope to use the little app (provided in one of your links)which will consume GDI handles until break point. I will test this on a Windows 2000 Terminal Server, then re-test with the same server loaded with Windows 2003 Server. I'll let you know the results. Basically I just want to be sure the GDI limitation is noticeably higher on Windows 2003/XP.

Just to frighten you all - our app which seems to tip the O/S over the edge can consume as many as 6,000 GDI handles on it's own! Our development team are telling me there is not a great deal else we can do with VB6 and the amount of Grids and Forms needed in the specification. Ie, we need this many handles to provide the functionally rich application and also give good performance when switching between screens. We use a few 3rd party Grids, Tree Views and List Bars, so perhaps there is nothing we can do... Let me know if you think otherwise. I agree from a network Admin point of view that perhaps the O/S is not to blame, but the application's hungry GDI usage.

Cheers,

Chris Matthews
Network Manager
EMS Solutions