>>>I am having a serious problem with two new machines running NT 4.0, SP4. VFP processes hang, and in some circumstances, terminate for no apparent reason. Opening Task Manager shows VFP status as 'Not running' These machines are 450MHZ PII's w/ 1G RAM. File sizes are 1G+ w/2M+ records. Has anyone else experienced this wierd behavior and/or know of a solution?
>>>
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>>What motherboard? You may have nailed yourself, since the PII's address space is limited by the support chipset, and there are known cache coherncy issues with >512MB of physical memory and Slot 1 processors. I'd try reducing the physical memory, or switching to an NX chipset motherboard with Xeon processors if you really need 1GB of memory.
>>>Thanks
>>>
>>>Tim
>
>Running on an ASUS P2B-DS motherboard. 440BX Chipset. I checked out the MS KB and found this article:
>

You might look at using one of the SuperMicro GX chipset motherboards with a PIII processor (a close equivalent to the P2B-DS would be the SM P6DGU, which is a dual-processor configuration using the same Adaptec chipset. I use the P6DGS, which is a dual processor motherboard with the Adaptec 7895 dual-channel UW chip; since I already had a number of UW drives, and the ARO1130CA RAIDPort was available to support the 7895, but not the 7890 UW2, and I get better cumulative throughput with the dual cahnnel RAID array in any case.)

>http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q190/3/12.asp
>
>Evidently just confirms what you already knew. So are my only options to:
> a) Replace MB w/NX type

A 450NX motherboard, or 440GX with Xeons like the SuperMicro S2DGU, and NT Server Enterprise Edition, will probably give the highest performance (actually, you might want to look at the SM P6DGH, which uses the GX chipset and the Intel I2O architexcture to offload the I/O from the system processors, and uses the Adaptec 7896 dual UW2 chipset as well). IAC, you really need to move away from the BX chipset, and in general, away from Slot 1, if you need to support >512MB in a single processor configuration. You might want to look at a 2- or 4-way Pentium Pro system, which can handle the 1GB of memory (but then you have to use different memory AFAIK, the PPro chipsets didn't support SDRAM, opting to support the now-defunction BEDO stuff.)

> b) Reduce RAM to <512

The quickest and least expensive solution. If you're using native tables and running a single instance of VFP, reducing memory may not have a major impact on VFP performance directly given the table sizes you have. A hardware RAID and <512MB solution might give you better system throughput. I don't know if the P2B-DS has a RAIDPort III option (the SM S2DGU and P6DGU can be ordered with a RAIDPort III option, and I'm using the P6DGS with RAIDPort II, so I know that's available.)

> c) Replace OS to Win98?

Won't help, and actually may hurt you overall; it's a motherboard and processor issue, not an NT issue. NT will support up to 4GB of physical RAM if the processor can handle it; the advantage of Server Enterprise is how the 4GB address space is partitioned between system and application adress spaces. Win98 doesn't manage memory nearly as well as NT, and doesn't support many of the software disk options available to improve I/O subsystem performance like stripe sets. You're forced into a hardware RAID environment with Win98, which probably defeats some of the reasons you went with the P2B-DS IAC.

> d) ??

Anything else would involve replacing the whole thing top to bottom with something else targeted at the server marketplace, either using Xeons or Pentium Pros.