>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.

Their are lots of tips to improve performance. A great place to start is on MS VFP 3.0 page in a file on performance optimization for 3.0 (tips work for 5.0 as well). The most important ones I know are these 2

1. Any task on a large table must be rusmore optimized. Create the index to do this.

2. A complex form, especially one with many page frames takes a long time to load. Store all items on less commonly used pages as a container object in
the vcx file and then remove them from the page. On activation of the page, add the container object. The user will wait a second or so when jumping to the less used page the first time but the whole form will load much faster.
Same for custom ocx files. They are very slow. Load them on an as needed basis. Also, if you use one or 2 forms a lot don't release them when you close them, just hide them. Then show them when you want them back. Much, much faster.

HTH