>All
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>I'm in the position to suggest/propose performance standards for future contracts and I'm wondering what constitutes a 'reasonable' amount of time.
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>I'm talking about NOT getting systems whose reports average 3-18 hours to run (yes, I said HOURS), screens that take upwards of 2-3 minutes to display, etc.
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>We're talking Novell 3.x, 4.x networks, individual workstations are (on average) 486-66 DX's 16 M RAM and we run VFP, VFP/Sybase, MicroFocus COBOL, and will soon be stepping off into VB combing with various backends. I'm looking for suggestions, recommendations, etc..... especially for languages other than VFP/FP. Any help would be appreciated.


I would speak to a "pro" in each area that you expect to implement. As a VB/VFP programmer I can't speak about Delphi, never mind about MicroFocus COBOL.

As for Visual Basic, backend fetching time of data should be the same. But once you have the data, expect database operations to be substantially slower then VFP/FP if tables are bigger then 30,000 records.

3-18 hours for reports (even on a mainframe) can be acceptable depending on the queries you are performing. I've had 12-20 hour queries before. Huge datasets performing numerous joins.

But working with 200,000 records and waiting for 5-20 minutes in Visual Basic is ridiculous considering regular databases perform those type of queries in a minute.

The biggest way to enhance performance is at the Novell server level. Seek an extremely knowledgable person. Everything from number of users, cabling, hubs, server type, configuration has an effect.