Problem:

Many customers use share names to map the data files that they are using with their applications.

For example instead of using the following:

           SELECT INPUT-FILE ASSIGN TO "DRIVE:\\DIRECTORY\\FILE.DAT"

                  ORGANIZATION IS ........

                  ............

The SELECT statement is being altered with the following:

           SELECT INPUT-FILE ASSIGN TO "\\\\MACHINE\\DIRECTORY\\FILE.DAT"

                  ORGANIZATION IS ........

This is done to avoid having to map a drive to another machine in most circumstances.

Resolution:

Under a unit test environment, where performance is not a major consideration most of the time, this does not cause any significant performance problems, especially when animating your programs.

BUT if the intent is to do some performance testing or to deploy the application where the Share Name will be local, meaning that the Share Name is NOT on a different workstation/server but rather on the same workstation/server from which the application will be running then this can cause some significant performance problems.

The performance decline will be dependent on the network settings as well as the workstation/server settings in your environment.

The cause of the problem is explained in the following Microsoft technical article;

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278678/en-us