dear all,

i was wandering around the technote section of apple's site and stumbled on
this. it is revelant to recent questions on the subject on this list.

enjoy,
:-j

from apple tech note tb18
<http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tb/tb_18.html>

<quote>
There is a limit to the number of the resources in a single resource file.
This limitation is imposed by the resource map. There are two bytes at the
end of the resource map which are the offset from the beginning of the
resource map to the beginning of the resource names list. If there is only
one type of resource, then the overhead, from the beginning of the resource
map to the beginning of the reference list, is 38 bytes. Since the offset is
a two byte value, and is a signed number, its highest possible value is
32767. This is the limitation. If you subtract 38 bytes for the overhead,
and divide the difference by 12 (the number of bytes for each reference) you
get about 2727.4--the limit to the number of resources in a single file is
2727.

The Resource Manager was not intended to manage large numbers of resources,
and as a result, its performance is particularly bad with many resources.
Because of these restrictions, we recommend that developers avoid using the
Resource Manager as a data base tool.
</quote>