>>My understanding of the DBC locks "issue" is that it applies only when one person is updating a view
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>You're mistaken. Every time a query executes, the record is locked, long enough to extract the query from the DBC, then unlocked. It seems the lock is done to prevent someone attempting to update the view defintion while someone is trying to run it.

OK, thanks for the heads-up. According to Aaron's post the entire DBC is locked while the view rows are SELECTed. That would definitely cause more contention than I originally thought.

I wonder what happens in the case of DBCs that don't change, and that are marked read-only at the OS level. File and record locks are meaningless in the context of a read-only file.

SNIP

>The more queries are run OR the more users, the more likely there will be a contention.

I still think if he's getting consistently poor performance on a high-speed LAN, his main problem(s) lie elsewhere. I'd think this contention problem would be very intermittent and could even be fairly hard to reproduce reliably.

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>>There likely are MANY other reasons for poor performance on a gigabit LAN (search the threads here for [slow performance network] or similar for discussions). I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to nail down this rare condition without testing for more likely problems first, such as
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>>- bad hardware - cabling, switchgear, NICs
>>- antivirus (test with it disabled on both server and workstations to see if that makes a difference)
>>- improperly configured DNS on modern W2K/W2K3 Server/XP workstation LANs
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>>etc. etc.