Very slow fp

[Bill Vermillion]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 06:07:11PM -0600, Rick Hane thus spoke:

> On our network (win2000 pro) we currently use filepro 4.05.
> The filepro directory resides on one of the servers on the
> D: drive in a shared folder called filepro. Yes there is a
> folder d:\filepro\filepro. The workstations have their own fp
> directory witha mapped drive to the D:\filepro on the server.
> All works great and has for years.

> Problem, I needed to set up so I could run fp directly on the
> server at times. So I created the following batch file....

> set PFNET=ON
> set PFSYNC=ON
> set PFDSK=D
> set PFPROG=D:
> set PFDATA=D:
> set PFDIR=/filepro
> set PFCMARK=80
> set PFRETRY=20
> p dbs
> cd\
> cls

> Although this works it is gawd awful slow. Any thoughts as to
> what is wrong.

> BTW, yes we have fp network version 5.0.13 and have just
> purchased fpODBC but have not had time to install the 5.0.13
> yet.

As Ken said "What is slow".

But - have you checked to see if there is a problem on your network
to start with.

It might help to explain what it was you were trying to do.

At one site in the far past, the only way I was able to get speed
up to the way they area that had been on Xenix up to standards they
accepted was to split the processing so that some was being done
locally and then to the main server.  This was a print generating
about 1600 letters.   I found I could generate this locally and
then transmit the entire print job at a much higher rate than
assembling the print job over the network.

That is just on example - so tell us what you were trying to do.

Try some file transfers on you network and see if the time is up to
what you expect.  Are you using hubs or switches - those will make
a big difference if you are doing a lot.   

And if things don't seem as fast as they should be try pinging
from one to the other BUT be SURE to set the packet size
from the default 56 bytes to about 1450 bytes.  Set the count to
at least 500.

Ping syntax in MS land is wildly different than Unix.

ping -l 1450 -n 500 <hostname>

In Unix land it would be  ping -s 1450 -c 500 <hostname>

In MSland the -s is 'timestamp for count hops' [that has to be
somthing MS invented] and -c is not used.

IOW - verify the transport first before trying to diagnose tha
application.  Failure to do so can be a recipe for frustration.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com