What's the upper limit on GDI objects for one process in Windows 7?

Question

Have an application with a GDI leak that will eventually hit 10,000 allocated GDI objects and crash. I tried increasing the GDIProcessHandleQuota to 20,000, but the program still crashed when it reached 10,000 objects. We're currently working on patching this leak, but out of curiosity--is there a way to increase the GDI limit for a single process? Or is 10k an individual application's hard limit?

Answer 1

10K is a hard limit.

GDI objects represent graphical device interface resources like fonts, bitmaps, brushes, pens, and device contexts (drawing surfaces). As it does for USER objects, the window manager limits processes to at most 10,000 GDI objects [...]

Mark Russinovich has a series of articles that go in-depth about the various limits in Windows. You might find these two useful:

• Pushing the Limits of Windows: USER and GDI Objects – Part 1
• Pushing the Limits of Windows: USER and GDI Objects – Part 2

Another good article from Raymond Chen:

• Why is the limit of window handles per process 10,000?