>Precisely without buffering, there might very well be a performance penalty.
>
>Consider this case:
>
>

>APPEND BLANK
>REPLACE Field1 with Value1
>REPLACE Field2 with Value2
>REPLACE Field3 with Value3
>FLUSH
>

>
>With an implicit FLUSH, each separate REPLACE command would write to disk separately - and that would be much slower than writing to disk thrice, once for each REPLACE command.
>
>Of course, I know that the three REPLACE commands can be combined into one - but do all programmers do this?

I never used FLUSH in years. I tried it yesterday for a new approach but I dropped it today when I changed the lock to be at the related table level. So, I never exactly tried to know how VFP in the back is dropping the data to disk. My assumption is that was normally instantly. But, we've seen at high traffic that this is not usually the case if you have multiple apps querying the table at the same time.