¿loops slowing down a script?

[jfortes]

We have experienced this behaviour a lot of times but still don´t know how to solve it.

The thing is that scripts using 'loop' and 'go to next record' to do something to all, or a lot of records in a table, go incredibly faster in the beggining of the table and then it slows down as it goes down the table.

¿Has anyone notice this before?

I am talking of tables with more than 200.000 records and scripts that take 10 hours or more to finish running in a FM7pro against FMServer v.3 installed in the same computer.

[Wim Decorte]

First of all: you're asking for trouble when running FMP on the same machine as FMS. You can't be sure if FMP opened the files hosted by FMS or if it opened them from the hard disk. If it did open from the hard disk directly that would:

- create an instant performance degradation

- corrupt your files in the long run

As to the slow-down on looping through large record sets; if you do anything on an indexed field then that index has to rebuild, which can take a lot of time on large found sets.

[jfortes]

Thanks for the response Wim, you are right.

All files are opened from FMS. All references point to FMS, and I have the belief that if you have those files open in FMS you cannot open them from the HD.

Anyway, you must be right with the indexed fields. if I write empty indexed fields or create new records with indexed fields, the Index becomes larger and larger all the time.