For the most part there are two things going on with people that are claiming VFE has poor performance in comparison to other frameworks.

The first is that they are basing their opinions on the initial release of VFE 6.0, which was slower than most of the frameworks at form instantiation and in some other areas.

The second is often people will blame performance problems that they created themselves on the framework. For example, we just ran into a situation where a customer was complaining about poor performance and it turned out that he was retrieving 46,000 records into two separate views using non-optimized SQL and putting these items into a combobox.

At last year's Great Lakes Database Workshop Vision Data Solutions did a comparison of VFE, Mere Mortals, MaxFrame and Codemine. There were several benchmarks used and the differences in performance were extremely marginal, however, in several of them, VFE was actually the fastest framework. That was with VFE 6.2 and performance has been improved significantly since then as well.

Specifically, 200-300 Mhz machines should be OK. Memory is more important. We'd recommend a minimum of 64 Megs.