hiding Data

[Geoff Canyon]

At 10:09 AM -0500 1/22/02, Richard D. Miller wrote:
>I believe the limit per field is 64k, but I'd like to know if that's not the
>case.
>
>If I was to put the 7 mb of data into the custom property of a stack, for
>example, I suppose I could open it as invisible at startup. The question is,
>would accessing a particular item in that data be any slower than if the
>data was just sitting in a global variable? Or it is better to open that
>stack at startup, read the data from the custom property into a variable,
>and then close the stack (with its destroystack set to true)?

The limit for fields, as for most storage items, is a shared 4GB (yes -- four gigabytes -- ain't it grand?) space. That means that the sum of all your fields, scripts, and a number of other things must be less than 4GB. In practice, you'll never run into this limit. :-)

Global variables are supposed to be somewhat faster than properties, and both are _much_ faster than fields.

In order to get the data into the fastest storage (globabl variable) without duplicating the memory requirement, your last option (or storing the data in a standard file and reading it in) sounds like the way to go.

regards,

Geoff