>Hi everyone,
>
>I have developped an application running VFP5 using the VFExpress framework 5.01 . The application itself is running fine everywhere except for this one customer.
>This customer is using my app in 4 different buildings. The main building (A) is equipped with a 10/100 LAN and all it's users have no problem with the app except when a or more users from any of the other 3 buildings (B-C-D) is (are) concurrent. The connection to these other 3 buildings is a WAN - radio signal 2 MB (Lucent Technologies cards) which is shared among users from these 3 buildings (B-C-D). In any case ... even when used by 1 single user their response time is awfull. So if 3 concurrent users from building B-C-D are using the app they are sharing this WAN 2Mb. Bandwith and in essence it may be equivalent to a 600-700 KB bandwith connection per user. So when users in B-C-D are using the app, users in A suffer from the poor performance and start getting multi-user issues (i.e: file or record not available)
>The application's .exe and tables, indexes and the rest are on the server side, and only the VFP5 runtime is installed on the clients. The server is a late model Compaq 500 Mghz. and all clients are running mostly late Compaq machine with 450 Mghz. with 64 Mb or 128 Mb RAM. The application was not designed to have data access performed through views and it's accessing tables directly. There are also numerous lookups objects in numerous forms. Most of these lookups tables contain 1000 to 3000 records each.
>I am looking for a solution to this performance issue. I have so far looked at:
>1.- Upgrading the WAN to 10Mb. but was told the real throughput is about 6 to 7 Mb.
>2.- Going to fiber optics - may be over customer's budget capacity
>3.- Going to an SQL-Server - means I have to re-write whole application
>4.- Do you have another option ?
>
>TIA
>
>Pierre Richard
>16320@ican.net

Hi Pierre,

If you have questions like this you can still post them on the F1Tech Peer Support forum - some people still check it regularly.

One thing you need to do with VFE5 once you've got your app the way you want it is make sure your bizobjs are using DBCX in Passive mode, not Active (which is the default). In Active mode, when a form loads etc. a lot of its DBCX object properties are pulled from tables in \METADATA at runtime. Switching to Passive mode writes the values from the Metadata directly to the object and tells VFE to no longer retrieve them at runtime. Rather than going out to the network drive and hitting METADATA for every label caption etc., the values are read straight out of the class libraries - which will be fast, if the .EXE is local.

On a P133 I got a 2x to 3x speed improvement in form loading by doing this. The difference would probably be greater on faster PCs.

If you have a slow link, local .EXEs will definitely help. Properly designed local views can also reduce the amount of data pulled over the wire, but that would mean a significant amount of work to implement.