>>>All
>>>
>>>I'm in the position to suggest/propose performance standards for future contracts and I'm wondering what constitutes a 'reasonable' amount of time.
>>>
>>>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.
>>>
>>>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.
>>
>>Basically, there are two sides: hardware & software. It's impossible (alwost) to write a screen which will open 2-3 min. because of software limitations. BTW, Foxpro is the fastest DB engine. I have high-volume system (millions of records) with seamless screen opening/querying/reporting.
>
>If my screens are not open and fully displayed with 30 seconds of selection from a menu, etc - I start looking into why. Which is (I guess) the basic question here:
>
>As professional programmers, what constitutes "reasonable" in the phrase "reasonable amount of time"? As in "I started this report an hour ago and it's still running". Is that reasonable for a 500,000 record file? a 1 million record file? 10 million? When do YOU start looking a the coding for optimization? Generally, ANY query that takes longer than 3 minutes per 1 million records to run gets my undivided attention.
>
>What is reasonable? I don't care about hardware limitations, those can be dealt with according to the situation, but if someone you have payed a buttload of money brings you back a report that takes 3 to 18 hours to run (and its a daily report) is that reasonable? I personally don't think so and have said so to the powers that be and have been given the task to quantitatively define "reasonable" and I'm asking for input from ya'll.

Screen opening should be seamless (let say less than 2-3 sec). There are couple ways to split bulky queries which can delay opening, so experienced programmer shouldn't come up with a screen opening minutes and hours. Reports are different story, in big systems their numbers and functionality may grow up indefinitely, but again there are ways to speed up main (frequently-used) reports. I don't believe that truly optimized 500,000 file can producee hourly-running reports.