In most scenarios, the very act of implementing a database system in a multiuser environment incurs a substantial performance penalty. Few networks in the world supply “across the wire” performance that approaches local disk access performance. Given this, your biggest tasks in optimizing your multiuser application are minimizing network traffic and identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in your local area network (LAN). Most of the following suggestions are based on this supposition that decreasing network traffic has the largest effect on your application’s performance.