It might not help for your roll-out this week but there are things you can check. Namely, everything. :) Beyond what the others have said (16MB on the clients might not be enough, streamlining your code, Rushmore optimization, not opening more tables at once than is absolutely needed at the time, etc.) you might take these things into account...

1. Assuming you can do anything about the network itself: What protocols are you running? Netbeui? TCP? Netbeui is a bit 'chatty' and therefore causes undo network traffic (but is, nonetheless, needed sometimes). Try to run only one network protocol, if possible. Adjust the packet/frame/etc. sizes to suit your (mainly?) database-application network. This *could* have a noticable impact on performance with all your clients. It has on one of my clients' sites.

2. Use similar computers. You said you have some 486's amongst the fast PII's on your network. The fast PII's are going to get more of the networks' attention simply because they are so much faster. This effectively slows the 486's down even more. You can test this by running your apps with the fast PII's turned off. If this doesn't affect your apps on the 486's much, then your problem probably isn't with the network or the mixture of the fast and slow computers running concurrently.

3. Monitor your network with an analyser (or NT's Performance Monitor) and make sure you're not getting alot of collisions or errors from a bad Hub or NIC. These types of network problems seem to affect the slower computers first.


Unfortunately, there's probably no 'magic-bullet' solution especially since you have to roll-it-out this week. If you can narrow it down to a specific area of trouble we can help you from there.

- A Hilton