Hi ho, all!

I am trying to write a process to fulfil a need my client has... Basically, it involves workstations submitting little jobs to a server process... and the server process ( a VFP7) app will do the jobs.

In a test using VFP 7 on a W2K server (766mghz 512 megs of RAM, and EIDE drive & nothing to do :-d)... I wrote a tiny little server test that watches a small jobs table called Test1. It checks the table every 200 m/secs to see if there is a new job to do. Test1.dbf sits on a share that is accessible to the pc's of the lan, but physically exists on the server.

Client side: I write a test prg to open the Test1.dbf on the server (via a share), appends a record, rlocks().. fills it out and the immediately unlocks and closes the table.

The client and server has sync'd time-clocks, so that I can compare submitted datetime() to completed datetime(). In my perfect world, the client should unlock the record, and 200-300 m/secs later, the server would process that record (that's naive expectation, I know, however..)

What I find is that there seems to be a significant lagtime for the server to see the newly created record, obtain its own lock on it and process it.

The lag time varies from 2 secs to 5 secs. But not once did the job complete in the same second as it was submitted. In fact, in about 50 tests, the lag time tends to be 3 & 4 seconds ..in more cases than it is 2 seconds...and this server really has *nothing* to do.

Now, I know that perhaps some reading this may have already chalked this up to the many layers of W2KServer... but my questions are thus:

1. What exactly is the lag?
2. Can I decrease the lag via settings/config of the server?
3. Can I decrease the lag via hardware improvements? (wide scsi, or beter)
4. If there is no tangible ways to improve such a dbf table based approach.. then what
suggestions are there of *other* ways to create a centralized job engine where speed of
execution (ie; delivery and acknolwledgement of the job) are highly sought after? .. and have it written in VFP?! :-D

Any advice on the above would be greatly appreciated.

TIA, Scott Barker