> First of all, thanks to everyone for your responses to my problem.
> Today I found the problem and I will try to explain in case anyone
> else runs into the same thing.

Nice to hear. I have seen some 'process hog' queries, but my
designs only hit them ocassionally, and they have never
caused a problem.

> We have been operating this application for over two years now and
> have never been happy with the performance. As I said in an earlier
> post, a calculation that took 10 minutes in the old DOS version now
> was taking approx. 2 hours. The good thing was that this process only
> needs to be run periodically. The problem was that simple reports and
> processes took maybe 5 or 10 seconds when they should have been almost
> instantaneous.

We still run windows 3.1 on some sites - fast and efficient
and still doing it's job. You can use a Linux server even if
using windows clients. It does seem to help 'responce time'.
Personally I am not happy with the bloat that sits on top of
Windows 2000. Why do you want a graphics interface on a
machine that should not need a local user. A job specific
machine works better. Perhaps a DOS one <g>

I take the point of your comment about client/server, but my
view on that is - the whole point of client/server is to
reduce the amount of network traffic. Rather than each
client looking at all the records, they just ask for the
ones they want. On complex reports, rather than building a
complex query and generating a single complex reply, I
usually do it in two or three linked queries. The client
does more work - yes - but because the query is broken up,
the impact on all clients is much less. THEN you can look at
improving the preformance of the bits. Since I only have
slow links (64k or less), bits of the query that are static
( such as your rates tables? ) are 'replicated' onto the
client, so that only the variable stuff hogs the network.

Hopefully this exercise has given you some insight into how
other parts of your application could be 'improved'. Nice to
see the answers!

--
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services