So that's what RAM's used for...
I've been jamming on an app for the last 2 months, a big voter update process that we're only going to use once to keep voting totals in synch across multiple platforms. The one thing that's bewildered me has been the painfully slow-ass performance.
In tests on my staging server (a WinXP Pro box w/256MB of RAM), the process cycled through more than 100 candidates and updated a DataSet...and took about 19 seconds to do so. Which totall had me stumped. It was a somewhat large job, but nothing extraordinary, and not really that daunting for a processor. It just ran slow. I even rebuilt it using a SqlDataReader (I'm using a SqlDataAdapter now), and it still wouldn't fly fast enough/
I finally said “forget it” (but I didn't really say “forget“) and deployed the app to my production server, which sports a couple of gigabytes of RAM and multiple monster processors and the same process ran, without any modifications in about 2 seconds!
D-uh!