Hilmar,

>Now, Sergey thinks that if the application hangs, the record lock might stay in effect for a long time. What is your opinion / experience on this?

I never experienced such problems. I doubt that this could happen when only the application crashes. The filelocks are maintained at the OS level and since the OS still runs, the OS closes the files and releases the filelocks when the application crashes and closes.

In a case of a workstation crash, I think the (N)OS settings do a play a role in potential problems. A server sends a keepalive package to each client at certain intervals to see if a client is still there. If it isn't, it closes the open files and the held record locks. I can imagine that if a keepalive package is not send, or the interval is too large, you can experience some problems in not releasing a record lock until the workstation logs on again.

Walter,