Dear Ted:

"Ted" <ted.kobayashi@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1190948453.740083.48980@k79g2000hse.googlegro ups.com...
> Well, excuse me. I had previously done a timing
> test between Clipper and xHarbour about a month
> ago and the result was xHarbour was about 20%
> slower (or so I thought). I tried to locate the tests,
> but it is either in the bit bucket or alzheimer's
> creeping in.

What? ;>)

> So, I tried the timing test on a current project: 1
> million records, each seeking into another dbf, then
> looping through a small 300 record dbf, then
> outputting 1+ million records with additional fields.
> Here are the unscientific results. Clipper using
> DBFCDX 41.67 minutes. xHarbour using DBFCDX
> 33.48 minutes, xHarbour DBFNTX 31.21 minutes.
> In this test, xHarbour was significantly FASTER.
> Seems suspicious the NTX was a little faster than
> CDX, but I'm not going to argue. I guess I should
> have rebooted before each run.

That only starts the caches clean, but yes.

> I may do the test again when I have more time.
> Any comments on the times above? Are they
> consistent or inconsistent with anyone else's
> tests? By the way, the tests were on W2000,
> AMD 2.2GHz, SCSI 160 drive, Clipper 5.3b, and
> the latest xHarbour. Might be interesting to run
> these tests on my XP computer. I'll work on that.

I'd guess that you won't see a major difference on XP. Where I
think you will get your reverse result is on Win98 or WinMe,
where you have a DOS foundation, instead of something spliced
onto WinNT that "acts" like DOS. Also the underlying file system
(FAT vs. FAT32 vs. NTFS) can be a major contributor.

Additionally, if you incorporate one of the "visual" libraries
for whatever reason, this overhead can also swallow some CPU...
slowing the process down.

David A. Smith