Slower Performance After Running Tools
Running Big Business Tools (4D Tools) to Compact and/or Recover your Company File is critical to proper performance and may provide dramatic speed increases:
• Compact removes unused space (deleted records) and reindexes the file
• Recover rebuilds the file (in essence defragmenting it) and reindexes
These procedures are covered in detail in other Solutions.
A Recovered data file may be dramatically faster (a data intensive process like a financial report may be several times faster) as a result of reorganizing the data (from the disorganized sequence of entry). It should never be slower, but this is a fairly common support issue. (3525)
The answer is (almost always) fragmentation on the hard drive. You should always have 10% free space (preferably more) on a hard drive. As the free space dwindles, fragmentation goes up dramatically. Fragmentation can also develop over the extended periods of use.
Both Compact and Recover By Tags create a new data file. If the hard drive is fragmented, the resulting file may be badly fragmented compared with the original, and may be much slower.
SIMPLY RUNNING A DISK DEFRAGMENTATION UTILITY, MAY NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
There are a number of good defragmentation utilities available (Diskeeper from www.execsoft.com--including the free Diskeeper Lite, Norton from www.symantec.com, etc.). Most will give you good analysis of the fragmentation, and identify those files with the most fragments. Most recommend "handling" (read on) files for best results.
TO RESCUE A BADLY FRAGMENTED BIG BUSINESS DATA FILE, THE BEST SOLUTION IS TO COPY IT (BACK) ONTO A DEFRAGMENTED DISK WHICH HAS PLENTY OF FREE SPACE, USING ONE OF THE FOLLOWING METHODS:
• Defragment the disk, then duplicate the file. Rename or delete the original.
• Copy the file onto another disk, delete the original, defragment the drive, then restore the file (copy it back).
• Defragment the disk before running Tools.
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