As many a discussion before has ended, there is a limit to the number of file handles you have available to use. However, I have found that VFP 3.0 and VFP 5.0 seem to work differently on how they manage local views which can greatly affect your available file handles.

My test environment was NT 4.0 running on Netware 3.11 (SFT). I also tried the VFP 3.0 tests on a Win 3.1 machine.

What I found was that VFP 3 includes local views as part of the maximum file handles pool. So, if you have a local view (stored in your temp directory on a local drive) based off one table (stored on a network drive) with an index and memo file, opening that view will use 6 file handles. When you only have a maximum of under 255 file handles, these can get used up quickly.

However, VFP 5 does not seem to tally local view files along with tables/indexes/memo files. Rather, opening the local view above would only use 3 file handles, just as if you weren't using a local view at all.

I would like to know if others have researched this behavior and/or experienced different results.

Thanks for any comments!

-Doug-