Hi Walter,
>To be honest, I do think it matters to have dual processors for VFP applications for the following reason.
>
>Most of the time, the bottleneck isn't really VFP itself but some other IO like:
>- Screen refreshes
>- Hard drive I/O
>
>Sure, most (native) queries won't run significantly faster at all, however, most I/O bottleneck are significantly reduced. So if a large batch of updates have to be written from the cache to disk, the OS could perform this faster.

No disagreement from me: but in my tasks that fills the secund cpu only 5 to 15%. The overall runtime of the vfp app doesn't change much - you get usually more perf from RAM upgrades until everything possible is cached and/or from using more spindles even if the pure vfp support in that area is not too great if you want to use cursors.

>Having the luxury of a dual processor system, I can only say (from my limeted experience though) that the responsiveness of the whole system has improved dramatically. In my applications, startup, interactions with 3rd party com libraries, general responsiveness have improved dramatically.

Perhaps is was a bit unclear: for WS running with somebody typing on the keyboard gettting paid by the hour I reccommend double cores because of responsiveness or better background processing, but for ***pure datacrunching machines*** I still reccommend single cores - since there is no operator getting better responsiveness. We do have some relatively beefy machines here only running a few days a month in parallel working on oodles of host insurance data, and the speed gain from the second core is not enough to warrant all of them to be double cores - only those used for testing / development as well.

regards

thomas

thomas