>>i absolutley do not agree here. from my own experience with the obove mentioned older mrp system i can defenetly tell you that there comes a time (if the files keep adding up) where the system WILL slow down! I am talking here about 2000 - 3000 files in 1 single folder. that old system does not clean up temporary files, so at the beginning they kept piling up. and man - let me tell you, after deleting all of them, that app was happy like a camper and real fast.
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>Are you talking about .Tmp files or files created by a system that did not clean up after itself - either way the slow down may have been caused by the ever increasing length of time it takes for VFP to generate another unique file name, and not necessarily a problem with the number of files - though this number does sound exceptionally high. And I have to wonder what the top end actually is.
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>Not knowing specifics about the system makes it very difficult to comment - for example, was the system keeping (most of) the 2,000 to 3,000 files open at the same time? Were the files sitting around unused for months, or was this a system with high frequency churn (files being created and dropped many times a second)? The coverage profiler would have to be used to determine whether this was a FAT, NTFS, Find-a-unique-filename, or other problem.

The mrp-system i am talking about is MAGI, writen by Thornapple (version from 93). what they do is the create all kinds of temp files for processing. they do not use cursors. however, after finshed using them, they do not delete the files from the hd.

therfor they stay in the folder, laying there dead - they never get used again. MAGI does not keep those files open, nor is the time problem caused by creating a unique file name. the problem is, that when i want to open a table and i do not speccify the path, foxpro needs to search for it, in any case there is a tremenduos drop in speed because of it.

I don't even think that it's foxpro's fault. the problem here lies at the operating system, needing time to read the folder. you can see that easely when you open the explorer and you go to that folder. it takes quite a while to be displayed.

in any event, that was back then. one of the first things i added to MAGI, when i started working with my customer, was to add a function which deletes those dead files.