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Auntiejack56

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Hi folks,
I have distributed split databases for clients over a number of years, with front ends always deployed to each users C drive, and optimised in fairly standard ways that you'd all be familiar with.
In the present case, I am deploying to users with weedy little notebooky things that are finding Access hard to handle speedwise (the BE is SQL Server and doesn't seem to be a problem).
I have never bothered using an 'open exclusive' switch as apps always ran quickly, but would it help in this case do you think?
Thanks,
Jack
 

theDBguy

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Hi Jack. I don't see how it could help. What are you basing that idea from? Just curious...
 

Auntiejack56

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I'm guessing that if you specify 'open exclusive', Access will be able to bypass all its locking and 'who's using what' code when opening and closing forms. And if so, perhaps it impacts speed?
Frankly, I'd be surprised if it made much of a difference, but equally frankly, I haven't encountered a machine as slow as the current one since 1996.
Jack.
 

theDBguy

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I'm guessing that if you specify 'open exclusive', Access will be able to bypass all its locking and 'who's using what' code when opening and closing forms. And if so, perhaps it impacts speed?
Frankly, I'd be surprised if it made much of a difference, but equally frankly, I haven't encountered a machine as slow as the current one since 1996.
Jack.
Well, if you open the FE as exclusive, I'm not sure how beneficial that would be since each FE is only used by one user at a time anyway. I suppose giving it a try couldn't hurt.
 

Auntiejack56

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Thanks, if I reply in a state of euphoria, you'll know it worked. Silence will indicate grim determined persistence and black coffee.
 

The_Doc_Man

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Are these notebooks on WiFi or are they hard-wired? That will make all the difference in the world. Wi-Fi, even "good" corporate wi-fi, involves a lot of handshakes from point A to point B.

What would make more of a difference is the number of CPUs in the notebook, their speed, and whether they have enough RAM to avoid heavy paging/swapping while Access is running.
 

Auntiejack56

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Hi DocMan, good points which I will follow up. I rather suspect the notebooks might be a little weedy, although if they aren't docking them and they are reliant on wifi, that can be woeful (wofi haha - ahem). Thanks.
 

The_Doc_Man

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Good joke Auntiejack56, and it could be more than woeful. When you have ANY wi-fi network step between FE and BE, you run a serious risk of trouble. The fact that this is an SQL BE means that you would have the potential for hanging sessions. If it were an Access BE, you would almost be guaranteed to encounter corruption.
 

wvmitchell

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In my experience there is no real performance difference. I had a setup where each user had their own copy of the FE, so we just used the default Shared mode; however this was running on a terminal server - a few users would minimize to their own desktop, forgot they had the app open, and then launched another copy of the FE ( and asked why it was slow) so we changed the mode to Exclusive to prevent that. There was no discernable difference between the two modes.
 

The_Doc_Man

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The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Exclusive vs. Shared would have almost no effect on the speed.

The file system will take out the same locks in either case because the file system is a Windows function, not an Access function. The file system does not manage the Access internal locks. There are several kinds of locks that one may take out, among them "Exclusive" and "Shared" locks. I think the only difference between opening modes is reflected in which flavor of lock is taken out. The internal locks will change exclusivity but will still be taken out because (I'm thinking) the way Access knows it is in Exclusive mode is the kind of lock it encounters when another user tries to "butt in" on the app.

I had to think about that for a while and I'm not claiming 100% certainty. But I will say that Exclusive vs. Shared (when the Shared Open happens to be effectively exclusive anyway 'cause no other users) probably is a break-even case.
 

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