A few months ago I had a question from a client as to whether putting multiprocessors on a single-processor Novell server hosting a VFP database would help the performance of a VFP 5 application. After doing some research, I gave them the standard answer: VFP is not multithreaded, so it cannot take advantage of multiple processors.

I am now having second thoughts about my initial answer, for the following reason: It seems to me that when a VFP application runs on a local workstation and accesses database files on a file server, the VFP database engine does all its work locally (assuming it is configured to do so in Config.fpw), and uses the server only to process file I/O requests. Those file I/O requests should in theory be handled purely by the Network Operating System, which should be able to take advantage of multiprocessors. For a VFP application configured in this manner, multithreading restrictions would seem to be irrelevant, because the database engine actually resides on the workstation, not the server, unlike the case of a client/server database. Thus, adding multiprocessors to a server could in theory improve VFP performance (assuming that file I/O requests on the server are a significant bottleneck, which seems to be the case for this client, as evidenced by numerous 'Error Reading File' messages).

Does anyone out there see any fallacies in this theory that adding multiprocessors to a server can improve VFP performance? Any comments would be greatly appreciated.