At first I thought I was imagining it. Then I thought I must have changed my indexes.

Finally I figured, I've still got FP2.6 DOS, lets compare that with vfp.

That's what exposed the problem.

I wrote a little test prog in both environments which simply opens a large file on the network and does the same query in both environments on the same data and the same network.

The DOS environment returns a query with 21 records (from 170,000) in 1.3 seconds. Which is what used to happen in VFP8.

The VFP9 now takes 17 seconds to produce the same result. I've only noticed this slowdown since I upgraded to VFP9. And sure enough, some of my users are still running on the VFP8 version which still operates at the expected speed.

Just to add to the confusion, that query is based on a character field (which is indexed). If I perform a date based query, I get the same performance in both environments (and its much much faster eg 7000 records returned in under 2 seconds)

Anyone shed some light on this problem?