Mark,

I would say some things you could do...

1. Reduce the number of indexes you use on the OLTP portion of the application.

2. What is the speed of your network? You could increse the network speed. Also, look at getting a high speed back bone with more switches connected to it. Or you could partition the network, put two or more NIC's in the server... this will cut the traffic on each LAN segment in half (if your traffic is fairly balanced.)

3. You could consider going to a web front end. This will reduce the network traffic a tremendous amount. Of course, you would most likly have to re-write your UI.

4. If you are doing alot of reporting, you may consider writting a COM object that runs on the server and processes report requests. Since the COM server will be running on the file server, and printing to the printer that will eliminate alot of network traffic.

5. Analyze where most of the trffic is comming from. Perhaps you have a ZIP code table that is constanly used for lookups... you may want to put a copy of this table on the local PC. You can look at doing this with alot of your more static lookups.

HTH,
BOb


>We have developed a specialised order processing application (using Codebook) that now contains a lot of data. The data lives on a file server running NT 4, and the order processing is performed by a workstation.
>
>When we process orders the network slows down as we generate huge amount of LAN traffic by reading lots of records via local views from the server.
>
>Firstly does anyone have any advice for us, our application is growing (data size) but our customer does not particularly want to move to a SQL environment.
>
>Regards
>Mark Letheren