>OK, if someone told me this story, I'd assume he was a real beginner, but here goes. Would anyone like to take a stab at explaining the following coincidences?
>
>I created and tested an engine yesterday afternoon that goes through about 6 or 7 steps on two large tables. 1G apiece, 1:M, parent has 4 million records, child has 8 million.
>
>I tested and debugged the engine on a 100 record set, made sure it ran through to the end, did everything right, etc. Then I set it running and left for the night, expecting each step to take from 10 minutes to an hour or so.
>
>Here's the strange thing, boiled down to the detail:
>1. When I came in, it had been running for 10 hours on one step.
>2. I brought up the task manager and saw that it was "Not Responding," but while I was contemplating losing a day's work it switched to "Running." So I figure it is running as planned, though taking a lot more time than I thought it should.
>3. An hour later I realized I hadn't checked the performance meter, and did so. There was no disk activity. So now I figure it is *not* really doing anything, and begin to contemplate cancelling it.
>4. Concluding it was not actually doing anything, I cleared the task manager and suddenly it went to the next step?
>
>What I can't figure is:
>1. Was it "stuck" when I was gone (hence the "not responding" by task manager), is such a thing possible, cuz it ain't as far as I know.
>2. Is there any way that killing the task manager would have "un-stuck" it, or was this a major coincidence?
>
>This is a newly installed NT 4, SP 4, VFP 6 (no SP 3 on this machine yet). The "engine" is on a top-level form called from another form, which will be converted to an out-of-process server once I've run it a few times and am comfortable with it.
>
>As always, TIA...

I've seen VFP show Not Responding in the task manager when it was really busy with data processing. Can you move the data to the local drive and see if maybe network access is what is taking longer than you think? Have you looked at using the profiler to see where your slow down is? Not know where or how you are getting to your data, I'm just guessing.

HTH
Jeff