Alan,
Sorry to join in so late in the conversation, but I would generally say that the problem lies not with Foxweb but the ability of the VFP programmer. For what it's worth, I run a site that is fairly complex and gets a considerable number of hits into VFP, and have never had the slightest problem. Except when I write really cruddy code.
If I average all pages downloaded across all available minutes in September, for instance, VFP was run about 30 times a minute. These calls range from incrementing page counts to determining banner placements to highly complex SQL queries formatting the returning megabytes of information, and it always runs like lightening. The only time things bogged down was a few months ago when I was hacked and they were streaming out copies of Matrix Reloaded from my server from a stupidly open FTP port...
I'm temporarily on an extremely mid-range server, (about to upgrade, they are sitting here staring at me to configure them), and run four channels of Foxweb. Could probably run fewer channels, but this works and I don't like fixing things that work well. As I said, the only real time things get iffy is when I write really cruddy code, (fortunately very infrequently!!!). Then because there is so much between me and what is really happening it becomes extremely difficult to figure out where the bottleneck is. But I have learned it is ALWAYS me.
So basically my reaction to your question would be that, like any networked use environment, is VFP up to the task, and more probably, are the programmers up to the task. From there, it's going to be the quality of the server(s) and the bandwidth available to you.
For safety and because I'm basically nuts, I'm installing double servers sharing various things across them. Primary server exclusively handles incoming fwx and html requests, secondary handles everything else, including data storage. This way the processors share the load and the hard drives do the same. I anticipate the lightening performance will pick up even more.
Hope this helped.
Joe Bigelow
HV/Net
Sent by Alan Harris-Reid on 09/18/2003 05:09:06 AM:
I have a client who is thinking of setting-up a simple web-based order application which I would like to implement using VFP and FoxWeb. One concern he has is whether Foxweb could handle the anticipated traffic. At its peak (ie. as Christmas approaches) we expect to handle around 3000-4000 orders a day (which I calculate to be 2-3 orders/minute).
I maintain that with well-designed web-pages and VFP processing code, we should be able to cope, but I would like to know what other Foxweb users think, what their experiences are with high-volume sites (is this high-volume?), and what are the pitfalls I should look out for.
Any help would be appreciated.
Alan