[quote author=iannew  link=1126787150/0#0 date=1126787150]I am a new Sesame user and in the process of translating numerous records from Q&A 4 for DOS to Sesame.

To avoid having to translate all the databases in one go I need to use @xlookup to get data from a Q&A 4 database (which has approx 38,000 records) into the new Sesame application.

It works but is extremely slow even when both the Q&A database and the Seame application are on the same hard drive.

Is there a way to speed up the lookups? 

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When doing an XLookup to a .DTF file, Sesame must partially translate that Q&A file into something readable. It must do this for each XLookup because it does not know whether you intend to do more, or stop at one. Some applications do many XLookups from a small set of files, and others do a few XLookups from many files. I wish Q&A had implemented QABasic commands that indicate when the application wants external resources and (more importantly) when it is really actually done with them. Something like file open and close commands.

To speed this up, you could try translating the .DTF to a Sesame format. That will allow Sesame to load the file into memory for subsequent XLookups - speeding up all but the first one.

Also, having all files on a single harrdrive will actually slow down any program (not just Sesame) in that two hard drives can be nearly read simultaneously, but one hard drive can only be read sequentially.