>A client of mine has a problem with very slow table access. This is their situation:-
>
>Windows NT4
>Citrix/WinFrame Terminal Server
>VFP5
>One of their tables contains 8+ million rows.
>Table size is 1.6Gb
>About 100 users.
>
>The table in question is being hit quite hard and some extremely slow responses have been measured. One operation is selecting data from the table, others are inserting into the table. Those that are inserting are *hanging* and task manager shows *not responding*. I've explained to the user that the process is too busy to respond to task manager.
>
>Another operation that updates the table has taken all day to update about 1,000 rows.
>
>Does anybody have any experience with this kind of slow-down? Any solutions?

I know this is going to sound really simplistic, but...

I had a slow response problem when a PK on one of my tables was a concatenation of 2 fields. When I changed the PK to a single surrogate integer field, performance was as fast as expected. I also do not update the PK field when sending updates. For inserts, my PK is generated by a SP stored in the database.

If the fields getting updated are involved in indexes, you are taking a good hit there as well. This is also, obviously, true of inserts.

Is the DB VFP, SQL Server, Oracle? I am guessing VFP.