What is the practial maximum number of Catalogue Items?

The size of the Athenaeum Catalogue is defined by a number of parameters.

• How many items in the catalogue.
• How much information is stored about each item.
• Whether you are using FlexiSpell.

Whether the final size is too big for you depends on what computer equipment and peripherals you use to run Athenaeum.

If you have "high-end" servers with high speed "fast and wide" disks, tape backup and high speed networking (100baseT or fibre), then a catalogue of 100,000 items may well be easily managable.

However, a small stand-alone 486 PC or Macintosh LC 575 might struggle with 5,000 items if there are many notes in the notes field, many reviews and little RAM (memory).

Currently, the largest Athenaeum catalogue installed in recent times contains 35,000 items. This resulted in a catalogue occupying about 50 megabytes of hard disk. Because this library was backing up onto Zip disk (zip disks store about 100 megabytes of data), this is a managable size. What's more, the speed of the system is acceptable. Enabling FlexiSpell increased the size of the catalogue to around 56 megabytes (about 12%).

The physical limit of an Athenaeum catalogue is two gigabytes of data (2,000 megabytes). However, this is impractical and SumWare Consulting expect most users would be disatisfied, even with fast computers and networks, with a catalogue exceeding 200 megabytes. That would be roughly 60,000 items with FlexiSpell enabled.