>My bad.
>
>If I have 4 million records and need to perform record level updates, could it make sense to split the file(s) and have mulitple instances of VFP (or a VFP App)perform the operation(s) on a multi-proccesor machine? Is there a possible performance gain?

The odds are that in order to run multiple simultaneous updates, the files would have to be opened shared. A single instance could open the files exclusively, which will dramatically improve the performance of updating the table. You still may see better performance with an SMP system, since OS work could use the second processor.

If you could run two instances of VFP, each operating against tables that they opened exclusively, then run multiple instances would work well, but if that's the case, running the completely independent updates on two separate systems would work, and likely would cost less to implement.