Easy ways to speed up DP4 utilities

Easy ways to speed up DP4 utilities - T4000001 - 1 Dec 1999

A number of DP4 utilities will run much faster on Windows operating systems if you turn off their comfort output to screen. When these utilities were originally written, output to the screen was very quick in comparison with operations such as writing a file. Nowadays hard disks are much faster, but updating screens is actually slower because of their graphical nature.

Therefore, unless you want to have an excuse for taking a coffee break, it is a good idea to supply a -quiet command tail to the following utilities:

IMPSETUP
LIBMAKE
MAPPOST
QABUTIL
REPSETUP
UNLOAD

If you run these utilities from a windows short cut or from the DP4 menu you might like to modify the command line for these programs to include -quiet.

Similarly, when you print from a DP4 program it is worth turning off output to the screen, unless you are printing to DFPRINT.

Some other utilities, such as MAKELINK (as built into COPYDB, MAKEDB, RECASTDB and NUMBSYS) do not have an option to run without comfort output. In this case the program will run considerably faster if it is minimised.