>>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.

You are right. But when I went back and forth from SET DELETED ON to OFF (w/out) DELETED tag I always got distinctive results and otherwise with tag results were always similar. So you are still right but the difference is not so big.
Have a good weekend!