>I have just made quick test for VFP Free Table with 203K records (volume=32M). The results are not so bad, especially for old-famed DELETED tag.

>                   Set Deleted OFF        ON
>
>Simplest Query           0.27s           29.8s
>w/out DELETED tag
>
>Simplest Query           0.22s           0.16s
>with DELETED tag
>
>Complicated Query       13.6s           13.5s
>with DELETED tag
>

>So, DELETED tag looks OK. I didn't test SCAN,LOCATE but to my opinion nobody should use these commands for user-interactive operations on high-volume data (at least me not!).
>All this stuff related to SET DELETED is pretty old but anyway from time to time it can really terrify people.

Keep in mind that for adequate benchmarking you'll have to restart your VFP session, and even better - your system. Otherwise issues like caching start affecting the results.