I have an old FoxPro 2.6 application that runs on Novell. The .fxp is run from a shared Novell drive. The config.fp has the TEMP directory set to go to a local directory on each client. At any given time there are 30 - 40 clients running this app from dos machines and Windows machines. Four times in the last year this program has slowed down to the point where a task that normally takes 5 minutes is requiring 2.5 hours. Screens that should load in seconds take a minute to load. It's as if the entire system is running in slow motion. We cannot find any reason for this, why it starts, and why 3 - 4 hours later the application will suddenly start running at normal speed again. We have virus protection on the Novell server, Trend Micro, but it is running 24/7 so it shouldn't interfere.

We purge deleted files from the Novell drive every night. We purge any FoxPro temp files from the shared directory where the app is every morning. The network traffic is normal. Wednesday I took the application off line, packed all the tables, and re-created the indexes from scratch to kill any index bloat. This slow-motion effect is happening more often. We had a slow down like this on Monday and this morning another one started.

Has anyone seen a situation like this before?