> If you correct the scratch file issue (I learned about the scratch file > about 2 weeks ago here on the forum) and you still have issues, here a a > few things I would try:
You can also test the speed of your network by copying a large file from the network to a local hard disk and then back to the network and timing it in each direction. A reasonable network should be moving 3 to 8 megabytes of data per second. At one client where they thought they were having database problems, I wrote a little VB script to do this and stuck it on the network. Then, when someone had an issue, they could run the VB script and get a message saying "Measured throughput X on download and Y on upload. Should be at least 2.0 MB/s." I found that values ranged from 8 MB/s to .01 MB/s (that is, about 10 kilobytes per second). The fastest machine was 800 times faster than the slowest! Using that, they were able to locate bad wiring and switches (but by that point it was out of my hands). The point here is to make sure you have a reasonable network throughput without involving the database at all. Once you have the network working properly, you can deal with any additional issues at the database level. But without a properly configured and funtioning network, you will never get good performance from R:Base. Make sure there are no slow stations at all -- since one slow station doing an UPDATE could lock a table for minutes, slowing everyone else down. -- Larry
