Australian PC World - Speeding up Microsoft Access

Speeding up Microsoft Access

I have a 486/33 system with 8Mb of memory on which I use Access fairly regularly. The stated requirement for Access is 4Mb RAM yet I have twice that requirement and Access runs rather poorly for my liking. How can I speed up Access to run faster?

Though you have 8Mb of RAM in your system, if you have not tuned Access, it is likely that Access is using default settings and not using the memory as efficiently as it could.
The first thing you should look at is the msaccess.ini file for a setting called MaxBufferSize. This setting controls how much memory Access has set aside as a cache for its I/O buffers. When Access needs to access a record it first checks the cache for the record. If the record is in cache, Access gets the record. If the record is not in cache, Access then checks the disk for the record. This disk access slows down Access while checking the disk. If we can ensure that the records Access needs are in cache then performance will be improved as a RAM cache provides faster access than disk.
The syntax of the setting is MaxBufferSize = x (x is measured in K). For example, MaxBufferSize = 1024 allocates 1,024K for the cache.
The larger the cache the more likely that a record can be found in the cache. The default setting is 512K. If you have 4Mb or more of RAM, then you can set more RAM for use as the cache. However, the optimum size depends upon what other applications you have running at the same time as well as the amount of physical RAM in your system. As a general rule though, allocate a buffer size of one quarter the physical RAM in your system. For example, if you have 4Mb allocate 1,024K, for 8Mb allocate 2,048K and for 16Mb allocate 4,096K.

Category: Data management
Issue: Oct 1996
Pages: 184