>>>Hi Gang!
>>>
>>>We have a customer where our program is taking over an hour to run their End of Day Reports for a POS system.
>>>
>>>They have over a million records in the main table.
>>>
>>>The PC has Windows XP SP3 and 1 Gig of Memory.
>>>
>>>How much memory can Visual Foxpro 8 SP1 handle under Windows XP SP3 ? Is it 4 gigs and would recommend this?
>>>
>>vfp8 can handle 512MB via sys(3050) max.
>>If the machine has only 1 GB and the vfp process is not the only one,
>> I'd go for 256-384MB unless heavy SQL munging occurs.
>
>Thanks!

Thomas is right about memory usage by VFP itself. But, there are some other factors involved:

- 32-bit Windows can make use of any free memory under 4GB for disk cache. If the computer has only 1GB total RAM, you may find that 300-400MB is used by Windows + antivirus alone. If you allocate the max recommended 512MB to VFP8, you might be left with only 100-200MB RAM free. Now, if the size of the tables your reporting process access add up to more than that, then the computer will need to page to disk to process the report, which slows it down a lot. On the other hand, with lots of free RAM the data files would be loaded once, then cached in RAM for much higher speed. RAM is so cheap these days, there's little reason not to always have 4GB in 32-bit Windows.

- Are the data tables located on a local, or network disk? If it's a network disk, and it's only 100MBit networking, that could be slowing you down. 100Mbit is only about 12MBytes/sec. Modern mechanical hard drives can sustain 50-60MBytes/sec. read speeds (each), and drive arrays and SSDs are faster than that. If it's a network drive, make sure it's gigabyte (1000MBit/sec, ~120MBytes/sec) Ethernet.

But the real question is, do you really need to solve this problem? Is this a one-time thing, because they didn't do the reports they're supposed to be doing, and that will never happen again?

Finally, I bet the real reason behind this is that the boss or someone else has to stay behind at the store for an hour after closing, just until the report finishes. Can you work around this, say by setting up remote control via something like LogMeIn?