>Thanks for that. Do you have any suggestions regarding suitable values for SYS(3050)? I haven't used it before. Is there any good relationship between foreground & background buffer size? Is there a way to estimate what values each/either should be, given physical memory size etc.?

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In general:
Normally I set both foreground and background to the same value.
The maximum value should never exceed physical memory, minus a good chunk for the OS and normally resident modules. This figure is obviously OS dependent, but my wild finger in the air estimate would be physical memory minus 10 MB. And even then, this maximum value assumes that only one VFP executable is running. For multiple Exe's divide your resulting max value by the number of Exe's. This in itself is a crude way of doing things.

For a small system where you want VFP to maximize its own ability to cache data - set the value to the sum of all file sizes (DBF's, FPT's, CDX's, VCX's, VCT's, etc.) and add (finger in the air) 15%.

For larger systems you may find that you have sufficient RAM to apply the same approach.

With multiple Exe's, you should look at whether files are accessed simultaneously by more than one system. For these (especially if the size of the files is way in excess of the available RAM), you will probably be better off allocating minimum RAM (say 5MB) to each EXE and then rely on OS caching instead of VFP caching. This is obviously again OS dependent.

Hopefully by now, you are getting the picture - there is no trivial solution. The nature of your application, the ratio of file size to RAM and other issues all need to be considered together.

Disclaimer: The above is based on my interpretation of reading that I have done over the years. My conclusions and recommendations may be complete crap - in which case I'm very confident that others will feel free to step into the fray and set things straight.