>>>You heard not only from Greg that StringToFile is suboptimal.
>>>
>>>>BTW, unless I did something wrong my tests are opposite:
>>>
>>>There is no reason to open and close in the loop if you use a special logging class.
>>
>>But in order to write into the file don't we need to open with exclusive access? I don't think strtofile keeps an exclusive access on the file.
>
>Basic need for logging is the put the info into a file as fast as possible without any other intrusion.
>From this it follows that your timing example is faulty for the base pattern.
>
>If you have the need to read this info *while* the process is running, this should be handled by a subclass
>or any other means implementing the different strategy.needed here.
>
>If you want to the log to show info from different processes, IMHO this calls for another subclass logging into a table -
>the mechansism for multi-user is defined, you can easyly add the needed process info and query for distinct process via SQL:
>
>As much of the needed functionality is similar,
>several minimally different classes are IMHO the best "grouping" for such functionality in vfp -
>in python it might be a module with one class picking the strategy to be monkeypatched -
>such a way of coding in vfp would be similar to binding some event methods to empty (quasy-interface) class.methods,
>which does not really make for clean and easy to follow code.
>
>regards
>
>thomas

I should be able to read and modify and delete log file while the process is running from Windows Explorer. With strtofile I can do that, with other suggested approaches I can not.

I reverted to original code and only implemented write_log changes. So far so good although 1000 haven't finished yet and the log file is already 12 MB.

Anyway, turned out another EZ application did have this line
this.cInvokeFullLog = space(0) and so the problem didn't happen in that application. I bet re-setting it in this dll will work as well without any changes I did. I'm actually running a new test now with 200 iterations. Too bad it's so verbose.