Thanks for the comments, at the end of your message you mentioned you had a large VFP/SQL Server installation, do you know of any large installations using VFP native tables?

>Hi Chris,
> FWIW I wanted to comment on the server hardware you are talking about.
>
>Visual FoxPro is not going to see much benefit from added ram on the server. If this is a terminal server sure the ram will have some benefits. I'm not too sure how terminal server handles multiple processors you might want to check on that one. Also multi processors is of no benefit to VFP as well. Either on workstation or server. NT/XP may or may not run different processes on other processors but I dont think the benefit is as great as people may think.

I'm not really worried about the terminal server itself being able to handle 300 + users, since the terminal server itself distributes the user sessions across the CPU's. So while each VFP session does not benefit from multiple CPU's, the collection of users as whole does. As a matter of course, we usually recommend 64MB per user on the terminal server, but that's to allow a large margin of safety. As I understand it, the terminal server actually only loads one image of the VFP runtime and our EXE into memory, and maintains seperate data spaces for each user session. So, if you had an app that requires 64MB on a standalone PC, and you wanted to support 15 users on a terminal server, you don't necessarily need 64 * 15 MB of RAM. Our in-house terminal server has 4GB of RAM to support 30 users, which is more than enough. But hey, RAM is cheap these days!

>Now onto the # of users: Back in the FoxPro days we ran 150+ users on a single server and 386 (yes 386) diskless workstations. This system had a large number of inserts (for those days at least) Could we have gone to 300+ people; I think so.

>However, depending on the retail store you are working in I would imagine that 24/7 operations may be a concern. A good set of questions to ask are:

The good news is that it's not 24/7, in this retail environment they close in the evening and reopen in the morning, giving plenty of time for maintenance.

>1. How do I back that data up when the system is in full operation.
>2. What happens when the system goes from 300 to 600 users (Not an unlikely situation if you get to 300)
>3. What is the cost of down time for reindexing or foxpro file corruption ?
>4. What happens when the retailer wants to create a data warehouse ?
>5. What happens when one of your compeitors uses SQL Server or Oracle and bad mouths FoxPro to the client (this has happend to 2 of my clients in the past few months)
>6. Will a retailer with 300+ workstations overrrun the foxpro file limitations? Retailers have some of the largest databases in the world and their data needs are enormous (which I'm sure you already know)

>FWIW we have a VFP/SQL Server installation that has 800+ workstations and 600GB of data. We have one table that has 800,000,000 rows in it. And a system that does tons of inserts/queries/updated a second.
>
>
>thanks
>Rodman