Slow peformance on Windows XP

[TJC Support]

Hi guys,

I have a console application that I've been using for about 4 years on
Windows 95 thru ME with no problems. It reads a text file one line at a
time, extracts data from it and builds records, then stores the records in a
BTF database. Their are about 45,000 text lines which sift down to about
21,000 database records. On my old Dell 266 MHz Pentium II (Win 95), this
process took about 4 minutes. On a newer Compaq 800 MHz Athlon (Win ME), it
took about a minute. On our new Compaq 2 GHz Pentium 4 (Win XP), it takes
about 12.5 minutes. I about choked!

My question is, is there anything in BTF that might cause such a dramatic
performance degradation when used with Windows XP & NTFS file system? The
app is a console application compiled with Delphi 5, BTF 5.55, no
networking.

Thanks for any suggestions or clues!
Van Swofford

[Stefan Andersson]

Hi!

It's a wild guess, but I think that since BTF are 16-bit DOS files they
really don't like the NTFS system. I noticed the same behavior when I
downloaded some files with an old version of WS_FTP, took loong time to
download even small TXT-files to an WIN2000 with NTFS, did the same download
to an machine with same WS_FTP version but with FAT32, worked smoothly...

HTH,
Stefan

[Andrew Denton [TPX]]

Just a shot in the dark here, but what extension are you using for your
datafiles. I know with interbase the default GDB extension causes problems
with Win XP System Restore (or whatever it's called). As an experiment, can
you turn off System Restore (or rename your datafiles to another extension)
and then measure the performance?

Regards,

--
Andrew Denton [TPX]
Senior Software Engineer
Q-Systems (International) Ltd
"I want to move to Theory...Everything works in Theory"

Those of us with [TPX] after our names are not TurboPower employees but a
group of folks that have volunteered to assist TurboPower and help fellow
users who have questions about the operation of the products.

http://www.turbopower.com/pub/visualplanit/updates/Fixes.htm

http://www.turbopower.com/pub/orpheus/updates/Fixes.htm

"Rob Roberts [TPX]" <do...@email.me> wrote in message
news:dSzOvk9b...@tpsmail01.turbopower.net...
> Van,
>
> > This would be a good time to have a profiler I think!
>
> TurboPower makes a very good one! :)
>
> --Rob [TPX]
>
>

[TJC Support]

The data extension is DAT and the index is INX. I'll give that a try
tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion!

Van Swofford

"Andrew Denton [TPX]" <a_denton.no...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in
message news:#ettyI#bCHA...@tpsmail01.turbopower.net...

[Rob Roberts [TPX]]

[Rene Puyhaubert]

I am using BTF under Windows XP Professionnal and Delphi 6 with a large
database (150 000 records, 800 MB).
No problem, and performance are better than under W98 or ME.

Rene Puyhaubert

"Rob Roberts [TPX]" <do...@email.me> a écrit dans le message de news:
KAPhwf6...@tpsmail01.turbopower.net...
> Stefan,

> I don't have any experience with XP, but I have used B-Tree Filer on NTFS
> drives on Win2K and WinNT, and I haven't had any problems. The
performance
> was fine. So I don't think there's any general problem with B-Tree Filer
> fileblocks on NTFS drives.
>
> --Rob [TPX]
>
>

[TJC Support]

I just did a test with a laptop running Windows 2000 Workstation, with
similar results to the Windows XP test. It was actually slower, but I
attribute that to the slower processor and disk combination on the laptop.

I wonder if what I'm seeing shows up because I'm writing continuously, as
opposed to just updating a single record or just a few. I tried our
commercial application on XP, which opens the big database (about 21,000
records, 2.2 MB, okay not big compared to some...) in readonly mode, and
gets only one record at a time, and as expected, there's no apparent speed
penalty. When it writes to another database, it is also only writing one
record at a time, and there is again no perceptible speed problem. It seems
that I only see it when I'm building the big database and writing 21,000 or
so records consecutively.

I also did a test on the XP box where I commented out the calls to write to
the BTF database, so that the only thing that ran was where it read from the
text file and built the records. That ran in under 1 second, so it appears
all of the time is being spent in BTF file writing. Next, I'll try to
isolate just where the speed problem is, adding data or adding to the index.
Hopefully I'll be able to narrow it down to just what particular function is
taking all the time. This would be a good time to have a profiler I think!

This is getting curiouser and curiouser.....

Thanks to all for your inputs!
Van Swofford

"Rene Puyhaubert" <Rene.Pu...@wanadoo.fr> wrote in message
news:beEaOf8b...@tpsmail01.turbopower.net...

[Rob Roberts [TPX]]

Stefan,

I don't have any experience with XP, but I have used B-Tree Filer on NTFS

[Tony Wong]

Hi,

Do you have the latest patches for XP? We had a similar problem and applied
this http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q309376 and all
is fine now.

Regards,

Tony Wong

"TJC Support" <jvsR...@REMOVEtybeejet.com> wrote in message
news:4Y6Weqsb...@tpsmail01.turbopower.net...

[TJC Support]

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded the patch and tried it, but it didn't
help. I think our problem lies in either writing the data or the index, but
I haven't had time lately to dig into the code and try to puzzle it out.

Van

"Tony Wong" <to...@doprocess.com> wrote in message
news:iI#CmaeeC...@tpsmail01.turbopower.net...