We are running the latest version of Novell fileservers and we are finding that if we do not open the VFP DBFs exclusively update (append from, etc.) performance is very slow by a factor of 10.

For example:

use foobar shared &&100k records and has indexes
update foobar set lname = 'slow'
*Takes 4 minutes on Novell
*Takes 15 seconds or so on Windows Server

use foobar exclusive &&100k records
update foobar set lname = 'slow'
*Takes 15 seconds on Novell

Same is true for append from. Replace statement is faster than update in all cases due to different locking going on.

Are there any Novell settings on the server to fix this? It's absolutely unacceptable.