Ed,

SNIP
>
>Jim, if you do tests that don't take advantage of the things VFP 6 in a Win32 environment will do, such as take direct advantage of >16MB of RAM, then FPDOS is very likely to be far leaner - the control structures are simpler, fewer complex calls to things like the Win32 API, and specifically to the GDI, are made, which would require significant attention.
>
I surely agree (as I replied to someone else) that VFP has far more functionality than FPD and so comparisons - especially involving tables - are difficult at best. Like comparing a stage-coach with a modern bus I would think.

>If you start doing things that take fuller advantage of things going on inside the Win32 environment, then you'll likely see significant improvements in the VFP side tests, because it interacts more directly with the Win32 services.
>
I don't doubt this, but I did it mainly as a lark and only used a single instruction (or construct for IF...) within a FOR loop.

>You can strongly bias your tests to favor FPDOS by doing a few things:
>
>Place all files on the local drive
>Set your system's performance to favor allocation of memory to cache
>Work with relatively small files
>use a fully defragmentsed swap file of fixed size on another physical drive, preferably on a separate channel
>Run full screen
>Run in a separate VDM (NT/Win2K)
>Disable your screen saver while a DOS VDM is in foreground
>If using 2.6, modify your PIF to only allocate ~15,500KB of DPMI memory for the DOS session, with 2.5, disable DPMI/XMS and make ~15,500KB of EMS memory available for the DOS session.

I certainly made no conscious attempt to bias in favour of FPD, and from the list above it looks like things were OK...
- only the .PRGs involved as files (no tables, etc)
---- same system, single drive for each flavour
- virtual memory strictly under WIN control
- no files other than .PRGs
- no SWAP file funnies done
- FPD ran in a window, VFP full screen
- NT n/a here
- no screen saver active on the system
- no PIF funnies done

Thanks for the input

Jim N