System slowdown, DOS version of FP

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 04:20:13PM -0400, Joe Acquisto wrote:
> The problem manifests as some, and only some, PC's begin to "print
> slow". What seems to be happening is that, when printing and invoice
> (or whatever), it takes forever (for some PC's) to sequence thru the
> records to "co-alese the vapor" and send the print job out. One can
> see the "records scanned" number sequence very slowly on the problem
> PC's, but quite smartly on the ones that are OK. Once the last record
> is found (???), and the print job is submitted, it prints normally. It
> seems to take a couple of days for this slowness to to begin again.
>
> >From what I can gather, the FP program stuff is on each PC, with only
> "the data" residing on the file server.

That's the way it works, yes.

>                                       I can see, I think, that there
> are few, or no, FP (pf***) environment variables set on the PC's, but
> I do not know if that is significant.

"It Depends".<tm>

> I know that MS access, for instance, requires huge amounts of file
> and record "locks" to be allowed on the file server, far beyond the
> defaults. I would not expect this in a "real" relational database
> environment.

Neither would I.

Alas, filePro *isn't* "a real relational database environment", by
which, I believe, you mean "something where the clients send queries
to the server, and the server sends back the set of records that
comprise the answers."

Nope, filePro is non-client-server; each client has to access all the
relevant -- and irrelevant -- data records over the network to get its
job done.  Whether this problem is client or server side isn't really
apparent yet... but what are the version numbers of *every piece of
software involved*, and what kind of networking hardware are you
running?

> Does FP really require environment variables to point it to data and
> indexes, (and etc. ??).

That depends on where they live.  But if it's working at *all*, that
layer of stuff is already taken care of.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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