At our company, we have found something that goes against the conventional wisdom. After putting in huge amounts of memory and fast disk space we were getting very little increase in performance. We had always assumed (and you know what they say about assumming) that disk speed and memory were the bottlenecks for VFP. We noticed that processor utilization was at 100%.

So, since this machine has slots for an additional processor, we slipped an extra in. VFP more than doubled in speed. Both processors are now at 40%...

(BTW when I say "we", I don't have mouse in my pocket. This was discovered by a couple of developers working late so I wanted to share credit.)

I don't know if the last VFP 6.0 patch made it multi-threading, or if it is simply making calls to windows 2000 which is multi-threading. (Any OS masters or hardware experts who want to give more accurate explainations are welcome to.) I'm just happy that we got some of the speed we needed, and wanted to pass this tip along in case it would be useful to someone.