Hi Ed,

I thought that the problem was more a question of number of small accesses than the quantity of data that's passed over the lines. I thought that on the lan, a typical access by a foxpro "client" to the file server based database is frequent as opposed to massive, and that the bandwith is rarely the bottleneck. The loss of speed of a VFP app (when you compare it to Access in somewhat comparable conditions) is much less when you run it with data on a file server compared to data on the station's local disk.

... so I was hoping that 0.5 Mb with peaks to 2 Mb would be workable until I have the time to "COM" my application.

FYI,

1. Our tables are rather small. The biggest table is 22 Mb at this stage, with about 50 records. It would be perfectly workable to reduce it by half.

2. the bandwidth is not paid out of my budget, the security around the VPN is. But I'm wondering if a thin client (eventually without the bandwith) is not (1) more effective, and (2) comparable from a budgetary point of view as the citrix has it's own security and encryption.


TIA for any misconception you could correct, before I go to management with my plans :)


>The problem is that the limitation is bandwidth; your typical LAN transmits data at 10Mbps-100Mbps, which an ISDN link may have a bandwidth of 128K. VFP executes client-side; any evaluation done by the program requires that the data move over the wire from the server to the client, and that the client perform any processing. If your netywork permits client-side data chaching with a reliable mechanism to validate the cache before a reference to the cache is used, then a .5Mbps link may perform reasonably well; if there's no caching, data will move at most at 1/20th the speed it moves on a 10Mbps (standard EtherNet); if the cache is not validated before every reference, you risk an invalid cache data state. Win2K Server provides mechanisms for client-side caching with verification; this did not exist in NT Server, and AFAIK, is not provided except in the Win2K and .Net servers (ie peer-to-peer doesn't handle it AFAIK.)