How many dc's are too many?

I've a program that currently uses 4 memory DC's at different times and concurrently. There's a ton more I could do if I use more. These DC's can all be as large as the screen at times.

On my Win98/333MZ machine I usually notice a drop of 2 measure points in each of the resource meter's 3 catagories while the 4 DC's are active objects. These points are luckily restored when I delete them so that is no problem.

I need some guidelines on how many is too many on the avarage machine. Any input or good alternatives to DC's?

A few calculations are in order. The minimum amount of memory in a DC is the number of pixels it could store. This depends on your bpp. We will assume 32 bbp (4 bytes per pixel). If your screen res is 1024x768, you are looking at 3,145,728 bytes, or about 3 megabytes. Thats a fairly hefty amount of memory, but you should only need at most 3 of these. So, thats about 9 megs of memory. Depending on the amount of RAM in the computer, a dozen more DCs of various sizes should be quite acceptable.

Z.

More simply it depends on how big the pictures are. You can have hundrends of small ones.