>>We are looking at some batch processes involing large databases, including some individual files near the gig range. Mostly these jobs will be run in exclusive mode, using standalone stations.
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>>I have been asked to spec these stations.
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>>I was thinking of zeon chips, raid five, and 1 Gig of Ram with Perc 3 raid controller and 128 Meg of cache. The question is will this really gain a great deal? Will 1 Gig really give us a significant gain over 512 Meg or 256 Meg. Is raid going to buy us that much gain in I.O. In general can anyone suggest the best configuration for this kind of thing?
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>When we have to load data here from the Army. I use a Pentium III 450 128MB Memory PC to process the files.
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>Statistics
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>3 Tables
>frn 15,000 records 12 Indexes
>lot 600,000 records a memo field and 20 Indexes including a PHdbase Index
>comp 5,500,000 records 3 Indexes
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>The original tables are zapped, indexes dropped, and everything is recreated.
>The File processing will take about 3.5 hours, which is plenty of time to accomplish this as a nightly process.
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>This biggest processing is the creation of the Phdbase Index on the memo field of the lot table (about 2.5 hours of the 3.5)
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>Total DBC and table sizes when finished is approx 1.7 GB
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>Just my 2 cents and my experience with large data files.

That is helpful. But the question is would my "super" configuration run the same job in one hour? Or a half hour? Or 15 minutes? Or would it take the same 3.5 hours? The reason I am asking is that we have a LOT of these large jobs to run. Also even if we would gain from an improved machine, would we gain from one this improved? Is any of this sheer waste? For example will we seen NO detecable gain between 512 Meg and 1 gig? Or a few seconds. Some of the VFP 6.0 documentation suggests that VFP can take advantage of as much memory as we can give it. But is this really the case? Ditto raid 5 scsci disks are the kind of thing you use for SQL server. Will VFP benefit signifcantly with large files?