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wkoelewy

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Btrieve application slow on win XP

Hi,

A friend of mine has a very disturbing problem with an application which uses Btrieve. The problem is that the performance of the application is not was it used to be. The application was running under NT4 with the clients running on W98. Now we installed XP and the application slows down as soon as more then 1 person is using the application. The screens open slower and closing screens is even slower(it takes 5 sec.!!). When running in the "old" environment, this was no issue at all and the application was performant enough. The vendor of the application has a very good solution for us: Install Persuasive Btrieve Client/Server and everything is fine. I'm not interested in a solution like this, because it is not clear to me why it worked well when running on NT4/W98 and why isn't it working that well using XP? We never had a need for the client/server software as we were told it runs fine using a peer-to-peer configuration with sharing the applications install directory on the "server".
Does anybody know what the solution is and do we really need to use the client/server software?
Thanks in advance.

Willem.
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Mirtheil
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wkoelewy

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There are 4 users at this moment and the version of Btrieve is version 6.15 (as you already guessed). Why the application is slower on XP puzzles me as well.... I now need to find out the best place to buy and the effort we need to install Pervasive SQL. Thanks for the time to write me an answer...

Willem
YOu can buy Pervasive from their web site (www.pervasive.com) or from resellers like Provantage (www.provantage.com).  The effort shouldn't be too great, it should simply be a matter of installing the newer engine and clients (if you go Client/Server).
Our company had the same slow down results, but previosly we already had several workstations running XP. The slow down was caused by files being upgraded from btrieve 5.1 format to 6.15 format. Our app uses about 12 files, some are still in 5.1 format. It was interesting to watch the app close each of the files, only pausing (about 3-5 secs.) on the files that had already been converted to the new 6.15 format. The 5.1 format files closed instantly. We were using 9 workstations, a mixture of 95/98/XP. Fortunately for us, our app only closes all the files upon exiting.

Your slow down is caused from the btrieve Close command. Yes, upgrading to Client/Server Btrieve would solve the problem ($$$), but two other workarounds may do you well. If you spent the money to upgrade to Client/Server Btrieve, then the server would be responsible for closing files and the client is freed immediately from the closing task. But two other workarounds might buy you some more time:

1) Have the application tweaked so that it does not constantly open and close any multiuser btrieve files (temporary single user files are ok). Ideally the app should open all files on startup, then close all files upon exit. If you can't modify the app, or the software vendor won't do it then consider this next approach.

 2) Determine which files are the culprits, which files are constantly opened and closed. Then convert those files to the btrieve 5.1 format. Do a bclone and a bcopy or use Btrieve File Manager. Btrieve 6.15 will happily manage and deal with your 5.1 formatted files. As long as the application doesn't require some of the new features in the 6.15 engine which might require the file to be in a 6.15 format you should be fine. You might check with you software developer to verify this won't be a problem. If they are unsure, then just try it. Of course make backups and setup a test away from your live data to protect your data investment.