My Dad’s company is upgrading to the new version of their accounting package, BusinessWorks. To convert on a duel xeon workstation just 3.5 megs of accounting data to the new version format, has taken more than an hour - before we gave up and left it to run overnight!

We did not believe the converter program when it ordered us to “Run this at the end of the workday. May take more than ten hours to complete.” I just don’t understand how you can spend HOURS converting three floppy disks work of data. I just really, really don’t understand it.

Every night one of the websites I coded downloads about 50 megs of data on 50,000 homes. It does several different data transformations (rearranging about 30 items per listing, and doing some other data lookups), imports it into a mysql database, and indexes the data - in about one minute on a cheap PIII 800.

I really, really don’t understand a time measured in hours for 3.5 megs of data. But then, this is from the company whose home page says: