I think you need to be careful with SYS(3050), my understanding is that if you try to allocate too much memory to FoxPro your apt to end up using virtual memory which will slow things down.

An alternative to arrays is using views. These put the data into memory and, my experience has been that calculations on the data are much faster, especially as you can index your views.

Regards
Jim

>In my old Clipper programs (DOS environment) everything was in RAM (using a virtual drive). As a result all the Field/Column calculations (requiring many passes down the rows of each field/column) were done in memory with no input/output to the disk drive. Speeded up things by “light years” 9 hours of compution reduce to 45min. Final results then copied to disk in one I/O.
I want to accomplish this in VFP so my processing is speeded up. First, I thought table buffering accomplished that. Second, I thought increasing table buffer size would provide more memory set aside for this process. The Tableupdate() function then would commit changes from memory to the copy of the table on the disk.
I read your reply to mean that this is not the way it works. So, am I forced to use arrays to speed up processing, or is there something else happening with VFP?