VFP 6 Slow on XP

[davewelsh]

My application was running on a Windows 98 network and response times were really fast. After upgrading to Windows XP, all data-related operations are taking a lot longer. A simple

LABEL FORM MyForm NEXT 1 TO PRINTER NOCONSOLE

, which would be instananeous in 98, takes a couple seconds in XP.

I would say that the difference was that I now have to issue a

SET PRINTER TO NAME //server/printer

before printing and a

SET PRINTER TO DEFAULT

after printing, but printing is not the only thing that's slower.

Once a day, all the tables are reindexed and a daily summary report is printed. The reindexing takes much longer now. This makes me think it's the data access that's slower.

Any ideas? Upgrade to VFP 7? Wait for XP SP1?

 

[davewelsh]

Update: (I wish there was an edit feature on these boards) The delays are just as long on the "server" machine too. ie, the one hosting the exe and all the tables.

 

[fluteplr]

How much memory do you have on your machines. XP is very memory intensive compared to 98. Therefor less is left for VFP to use.


If you do not have at least 256mg I would seriously consider adding more memory.

 

[davewelsh]

The computers have 128MB each. I checked the available memory with the application running (but not doing anything and all tables closed). There was still 40MB free. Is this the problem?

 

[Neil Toulouse]

I don't know if this is of any help but we found that if we 'upgraded' our computers in the office to XP, everything seemed a lot slower. We found that if we formatted the hard disk and did a proper fresh installation of XP all was well.

The computers here only have 128Mb RAM. "I love work. I could sit and stare at it for hours..."

 

[davewelsh]

Thanks Slug. We used the XP "upgrade", but actually did a fresh install from a formatted HD. (I didn't know this was possible until recently.) One other thing I can think of is that we're using NTFS now at we were using FAT32 before. Maybe VFP6 isn't optimized well for file access with NTFS?

 

[davewelsh]

BTW, the computers don't seem overly slow when doing non-FoxPro things. Other applications (Word, Excel) don't seem to have been affected.

 

[Neil Toulouse]

Not very helpful but I am using VFP6 on Windows 2000 (NTFS) at the mo and it seems OK! I use Windows 98 at home also for development and I can't say I've noticed any difference between them for speed. "I love work. I could sit and stare at it for hours..."

 

[rgbean]

VFP doesn't really know or care about the file systen it reading from / writing to. Since you just upgraded these machines, yes you will notice a slow down, first because XP is a much more complex OS than 98, and as was suggested requires more memory to effectively do the "same" thing. (Just look in the task manager to see how much more is running compared to 98 when "nothing" is going on.) Second, the NTFS file system does indeed require more overhead than the FAT32 FS, the additional features - security, compression, file attributes, etc. all can make access slower, but more reliable even when not explicity using these features.

Word and Excel are mostly memory based, and unless you have very large documents, you wouldn't notice a difference in their opening and saving of files. VFP on the other hand while it uses memory as well as it can, spends much more time read and writing data - it's the nature of databases!

I think that if you'd gone from 98 to NT or 2000, you'd be seeing similar losses - I went from NT to XP, and found things actually quicker!

First consider adding more memory to these workstations, especially if you run more than the VFP application at the same time. And if you use a virus checker, make sure you've got it configured properly not to be (re-)checking tables, indexes and memo files everytime there is a change to them. (Don't forget the local temp files VFP uses!)

Rick

 

[virusim]

Hi,

Maybe you should look into these function,
sys(3050,x) where you will need to set the
forground and background memory usage by vfp, else it
will default to using all resource which maybe
suffocating your system.

 

[kburrill]

Did you resolve this problem? We recently moved our networked database from a windows nt 4 server to a windows 98 computer. With the windows nt computer, the first person to open table(s) from the database found a fast response time. Anyone opening the table(s) after they were already open by someone else found it took significantly longer (up to 20 times as long).

Someone suggested looking into opportunistic locking. I haven't had any luck with this.

The client computers here are running mostly windows 95 and 98.

 

[ConanCode]

Dave,

You may want to try Xp setting of Virtual Memory. The amount of Diskspace allocate for this is very important to Visual Foxpro. Try it and let me know.

Conan

 

[baltman]

The problem may be an incompatible printer driver. Try using an older (or newer) one and let us know if that helps.

I have experienced intolerable slowness with Excel automation due to such an incompatability and it went away as soon as the printer driver was rolled back.

Brian