A bittersweet goodbye to the Vulcan Dynamic Memory Settings panel

Several months ago our development team was working on our Large Data Project and said they would be removing the Dynamic Memory Settings panel for our Vulcan 9. This brought me mixed feelings. You see, having used it thousands of times to ‘fine tune’ the settings for the data I was using that particular day, I developed a special relationship with the panel. After being introduced in Vulcan 4.0 as the ‘upgrade’ for defining settings with environment variables it is now ready to retire.

Dynamic Memory Settings Panel removed for Vulcan 9

Yep, that is right. The DMS panel – as I had come to call it – will be replaced, by nothing. When Vulcan 9 is available later this year, there will no longer be a need to predefine how big of data you plan to use prior to starting Vulcan. All the settings are now truly ‘dynamic’, and the user does not have to do a thing. Nothing, nada, zilch!

Need to load small data? Just load it. Need to load big data? Just load it. No more guessing, no more trial and error.

So here we are today, despite having a love/hate relationship with this panel for nearly 14 years, ready to say goodbye. (In a way best summarised by this Boyz II Men classic.)

Although truly dynamic memory allocation is my personal highlight, a lot of performance work has been done on Vulcan for our upcoming release. Like these amazing benchmarks highlighted by Bill Blattner, Vulcan Development Manager, during a recent webinar.

Benchmarks comparing Vulcan 9 with a previous version of Vulcan

And faster is always better, right? The beta testing program for Vulcan 9 is currently underway, and will be ready for release later this year.