Just for the record, my 160x speed improvement came with pretty naive code. I loop to a record, build the text I need for that row, append the block to the BLOB, clear the text and hit the next row. All-in-all, only a couple of lines of extra code.
After what everyone has contributed and suggested, along with my own local testing, my summary goes like this: *Build a text var* Yeah, don't do that. In my case, the final block size is ~3MB, not huge...but the resizing is pretty aggressive. *Build a BLOB var* Works great. The downside is that if you ultimately need text, you (even if briefly) need to double the amount of RAM you're consuming. I'm defaulting to a max BLOB of 5MB and change, so this should never be a problem. *Write to a text file* This should never slow down, no matter how big the file gets. This has always been true, the limiting factor being the speed of the drive. Drives are fast now. Memory is also fine because you take no RAM to store the document and can load it into RAM in one go very easily. I'm going with a BLOB instead of documents. Why? Old prejudice, and I like avoiding the file system. Permissions, file contention issues in 4D (been there not long ago...and after *more than a year*, there's reportedly a fix), data leakage. Plus, old prejudice. In my specific case, a BLOB should be fine as I'm not pushing the envelope on memory usage. Under other circumstances, I can easily see documents as being the best bet. Particularly if you have other reasons to want the data in documents for dispatching, archiving, etc. Thanks for the help! ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: https://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:4d_tech-unsubscr...@lists.4d.com **********************************************************************
