>>>>>Our company just purchased a new database computer with twin Xeon processors. Is there anything in VFP 6 that would allow us to take advantage of dual processors?
>>>>
>>>>Not directly, since VFP's unable to spread a single instance of itself across multiple processors or spawn new threads directly. If you're currently finding system response sluggish because of CPU-intensive operations, the second processor will allow other things to run even while VFP has one processor buried...
>>>>
>>>>In order to take advantage of the dual processor architecture at all, you need to run NT or Win2K - Win9x has no multiprocessor support built-in. VFP won't run part of itself on each processor, but other things that can run in parallel (like the operating system, or other applications) won't get caught up waiting on VFP if VFP gets into a CPU-intensive operation.
>>>>
>>>>One obvious way to exploit the dual processor architecture is to run more than one instance of VFP, splitting the workload where there is a way to see and exploit some inherent parallelism.
>>>
>>>Ed,
>>>
>>>Do you know if there's any way to specify which processor should start a VFP session on an SMP box? I'd be a bit concerned trying to manage one, that two or more VFP instances might start up on the same CPU.
>>
>>I've no experience doing this with VFP; SQL Server provides mechanisms to provide processor affinity masks, but I don't know what the underlying mechanism is. I'd expect that NT would handle the load balancing issues (it does this quite well on my systems here at home when I run multiple VFP sessions) internally, and you'd tend to hurt yourself trying to force a given process to only run on one particular processor.
>
>Ah... so, are you saying that, although VFP is single-threaded, NT will switch that thread from one CPU to another if it makes sense, i.e. when its time slice runs out?

Absolutely; the process can run on whatever processor is free at the moment, with a slight preference for running it on the last processor it ran on if the processor's cache still contains a significant part of the process working set. VFP doesn't care which processor it runs on, as long as only one is running that instance at any given time.