confusingly, there are in reality NO clients or servers, the damn file is shared by a number of COM objects, all waiting to see if there is anything interesting to do, and all of them were spinning their wheels for 10 seconds on each transaction, the project wasn't going to meet anyone's standards.

With what I discovered by testing various suggestions, it looks like the best is about 1.1 seconds per transaction, and possibly if I sleep some services 1.5 and others 1.0, they will get the new info at the 1.5 mark instead of 2.0!

Still seems weird that there isn't some sneaky little method to make a file "live" ! Once I tried running multiple users on a RAM disk! It was like a hornet's nest, it crashed with 30 seconds! SO I know that the buffering is unavoidable! But you'd think by now the language would have a wake up function!


something like

USE my_table
do while .t.
IF changed()
do process
else
do sleeper
endif
enddo

I'll add =reccount() MOnday ! TGIF !!

Mike