Thanks for the ideas Thomas. I'll give them all a try!

>Hi Tracy,
>
>I believe you should measure just the performance of the fread() and the
>following case without calling the specific import programs to get an idea of times spent there.
>
>Possibly more time is spent in the other programs...
>
>That said: Hilmars idea of simulating "buffered reads" by reading a larger part of the file is something that would have done wonders in win3-times. There I often set the file buffers (in ModulaII) by hand to fine-tune such tasks. Nowadays with read caches: try it.
>
>One thing: if the FRead() as such is much slower than your normal string functions, try reading the next header and size together with the data and split them afterwards.
>
>The next part is written under the assumption, that
>a) the different headers are evenly distributed
>b) a significant number of headers doesn't have to be processed.
>
>Checking for the non-process case ***first*** will eliminate a lot
>of case checks: Cetin is on the right track IMHO.
>
>If there are only 15 to 30 cases, I think seek() is the wrong function, if speed is of the essence.
>Method 1:
>create a cursor with fields for all "N" + Header
>Search for the Header to be processed via if fsize("N"+m.Header)>0
>and only then distibute though your case.
>
>Method 2:
>Build a String with all possible variations of "§$%"+m.Header+"/()"
>and search there with "§$%"+m.Header+"/()" $ m.pcSearchStr
>
>The calling of the worker programs can be optimized as well:
>you have (n[headeroptions]+1)/2 typical case checks.
>
>Either structure your cases in a tree like manner:
>
>

>DO CASE
>     CASE m.header = '2TRG'		
>        && new transaction, probably most called function
>	DO p_2TRG WITH m.header+m.size+m.data
>     CASE m.header = '1MHG'		&& beginning of message
>	DO p_1MHG WITH m.header+m.size+m.data
>     CASE m.header = '4'   && about 5 cases
>        Do Case
>             Case m.header = '4aaa'
>             Case m.header = '4bbb'
>             Case m.header = '4ccc'
>             Case m.header = '4ddd'
>             Case m.header = '4eee'
>        EndCase
>        * etc...
>     CASE m.header = '5'   && about 5 cases
>        Do Case
>             Case m.header = '5aaa'
>             Case m.header = '5bbb'
>             Case m.header = '5ccc'
>             Case m.header = '5ddd'
>             Case m.header = '5eee'
>        EndCase
>        * etc...
>     CASE m.header = '6'   && about 5 cases
>        * etc...
>     CASE m.header = '7'   && about 5 cases
>        * etc...
>     CASE m.header = '3MTG'             && end of message
>        * do something
>ENDCASE
>

>
>or put the name of the function to be called in the cursor you built
>for method 1. You can ¯oexpand that function name - this might be
>faster than the 9 to 12 case checks.
>
>my 0.02 EUR
>
>thomas