Given sufficient hardware resources, does VFP have any inherent limitations as to the volume of transactions/data updates it can handle in a given period of time? Or is it just related to how fast the CPU/hard drive can process them?

I work with an ISV on a large, mature POS application written using VFP 6 with a database/native tables and a mix of APPEND/REPLACE and SQL, no views. We have a lot of customers running it on LANs, but currently our recommended configuration for customers with ~10 or more users is Win2K with terminal services. Our biggest customer right now supports 31 physical locations in two states, with about 75 users spread across those locations. They are running it from a single Win2K terminal server, and the application gets hit hard during the day and it seems the handle it well.

However, we're looking at customers now that might have 200-300 users and we're wondering if VFP is going to have any problems handling the load. Assuming you have sufficent hardware (multi-processor server class machines with redunancy from Compaq/Dell/IBM are pretty cheap these days) with lots of RAM (4, 8, 12, 16 GB whatever it takes) and a SCSI RAID array, would VFP choke with 300 users hitting the data engine?

Remember, on a terminal server, all the users are really running the application on the same computer. Each user has a seperate "virtual computer" on the terminal server, but for all intents and purposes you have lots of copies of the same application running on one computer, all accessing the same data files locally.

I'm really looking real-world data that confirms or denys VFPs ability to handle lots of transactions in a high-volume environment. Names of companies that have large, high volume VFP applications using native VFP tables. Or case studies of such applications. Or papers from Microsoft/trade journals that cover this topic. I know about Surplus Direct, and I have Microsofts old paper that compares MS SQL, VFP, and Access. Does anywone have any references or documentation on this topic?

Any info is appreciated!
Thanks,

Chris Vesper

PS -
If you don't know what terminal services is, it is mainframe style time-sharing for Windows applications. Instead of a data server and lots of PC's, each with a copy of the application, you have one big server with one copy of our application installed on it. The data files are also present on the same server. The users actually run the application on the server itself, via thin clients, which are solid-state terminals that use standard VGA displays/keyboards/mice (similar to remote control) This has innumerable management advantages over lots of PC's, and the performance is fantastic, since the application and the data reside on the same hard drive (or drive array) There is no network latency for data access. Of course, there are other related factors involved when using a terminal server, but for our application, it works very well.