I am looking into optimizing system speed under VFP6. On some NT systems, it seems to be veeeeery slow. I have run a sys(3050) test, gradually reducing buffer memory. My initial ?SYS(3050,1) gives a memory of 42467328 and using an 80Mbyte file with 200,000 records, I can query out 35,000 records in 18 seconds using SELECT * FROM BIGFILE WHERE TAXSTAT = 'acc'. Issuing SYS(3050,1,18000000) reduces the query time to 14 seconds.

I am now trying to work out the best approach to offer my users (using an .exe VFP application). Is it worth adding a rountine that calculates their available machine memory and offer settings to reduce this using a sys(3050) command at startup? Should the command go into a config.fp startup file or could it be issued on the fly after launching the exe? Or is there a better approach altogether!