> However, when we tried this approach, it appears that there are still serious scalability issues (based on our results). What I am trying to find out is: Is there anyone else out there that has tried the VFP COM approach WITHOUT the ISAPI or Web Connect component on a larger scale.

The scalability issues you're hitting now don't have to do with VFP, but with ASP and how it manages COM objects. VFP supports 'multi-threaded' Apartment Model Threading operation, which is what ASP requires to make things work simultaneously. But this by itself will not address scalability - you can only do as much as your processor supports. If you're maxing your CPU or memory there's nothing you can do but get bigger hardware or scale to multiple machines.

IOW, resource use is your enemy. There are several ways to address this, one of which is more efficient classes the other is offloading heavy resource usage requests to other machines. You can do this with Async requests - I have an example of that (using Web Connection, but you can do this with ASP the same way) using MSMQ and sending off a request to be processed external to the Web process. It's at: http://www.west-wind.com/wconnect/ - look for the Async request operation.

>Rick has a sample app in his book which demonstrates that the new VFP 6 sp3 COM components DO in fact run simultaneously. However, it is only a sample app, and it *very* simple in nature. It *does* demonstrate that VFP 6sp3 should be able to be used as the sole solution (sans FoxISAPI).


I use and understand ASP, but frankly I would never use it for a large scale app. You have to understand for the book I have to talk about general technologies and can't toot my own horn. FWIW, I did load testing with ASP a while back which is where those comparison numbers with Web Connection come from. ASP can load fine if servers are designed smartly and run requests that run quickly. If you have lots of requests that take more than a second to run each you will have problems at heavy loads. You will have problems with that in tools like WC too - it's simply a matter of resources available on the machine.