>>>Hi Craig and Martina,
>>>
>>>Just ran a test with and without RamDisk for tmpfiles and sortwork and was disappointed.
>>>
>>>I am trying to optimize ExcelListener where there is a ~20MB cursor on which I run many SELECTS. Guess I have defined enough indices so that Rushmore is able to do its job well.
>>
>>If you put the original file into the ramdisk it might perform faster. If you run a query that produces a cursor - usually with READWRITE, and store that in the RAM disk and subsequently requery the cursor, it will not perform well until you add indexes to the cursor. If you have a big enough ram disk to hold the file and it is indexed, you might see some improvement.
>
>Thanks Mike.
>
>Alex

Since this topic comes up as others add to it, I thought of something else. Produce your 20MB cursor on the local drive. Index it all you need. Query it. I really cannot say that using a RAM drive will beat a modern local drive by much, especially since you will lose real RAM to the RAM drive. VFP will use the RAM as needed. The local drive will definitely beat accessing the file across the LAN. You could also attempt to use VFP multi-threading to run your many SELECTS in parallel on the local machine too.

The other option is to put the 20MB file on SQL Server and have SQL Server provide results to the users. SQL will use multiple cores and all the RAM to evaluate queries. If you parameterize your queries, SQL will reuse query plans.