pchernoff

Is there any difference in performance between 10.2 and 10.1.5?

FMP 6 running under Mac OS X 10.2 wants too much attention. If a script is running and it is printing and the print command is set to bypass the print dialog, FMP insists that it be the foremost application and will stop all activity until it is! This is a problem if you are looping through 400 records and each needs to be printed separately. This basically locks out the user from using her computer until this script has been completely processed. As far as I can tell, FMP pretty much ignores its environment and wants to act like it is the only application running at some times. Is there some way to get FMP to continue printing without having to be the frontmost application in this circumstance?

I've taken some actions and performed some tests. I feel stumped. 1) I rebuild my Mac OS X hard disk from scratch with Mac OS X 10.1.5 and did permissions repair (I have been warned away from 10.2.x with FMPS) and then installed FMPS 5.5v2. I didn't install anything extra, such as Retrospect Client or Timbuktu. I also reduced the size of the cache to 10% of the total size of the databases involved. 2) In the application I use, the time to generate an aging report went down from 1h45m to 1h20m. Some progress. 3) If I run this same database application from my Xserve (with hardware RAID) as a local application, the aging report takes 11 minutes to generate (with TCP/IP turned off in FMP) (and 14 minutes if data is on a local hard drive). If I turn on TCP/IP on FMP and set up the files for sharing, aging report generation time goes up to 14 minutes. This leads me to believe that my network is performing fine (all computers in question access the network at 100baseT). 4) As a test, I had another computer access the FMP databases with my computer as host. Response time was awful, worse than with FMPS as host. But response time with my computer (the host computer) was fine. I have ordred the June/July issue of FileMaker Advisor to see if its article on optimizing server performance will yield any clues, but FMPS performance just seems very poor. While I am sure adding a fast SCSI drive (I have a few cards available) would help, I don't know if anything short of adding a RAM disk, with backups every 15-30 minutes to hard disk) will really help. Basic lists and relational lists seem fine, but anything involving calculations seem to get very bogged down when using a "remote" FMP computer. Surely, for $1,000, FMPS has more to offer. --Paul

All of the database files make up around 82MB. So I will try reducing the cache from 40MB to 8MB. I didn't realize that the cache was done so poorly. I think I'll do some testing in single-user mode with different cache settings and see how long it takes to do the aging. Since I am running the server on Mac OS X amount of RAM allocated to FMPS is irrelevant, though I would be interested in know if merely having too much RAM on the Mac server could be doing any harm. Thank you for the suggestion.

We are using a database application developed by another company. After doing some comparison between multi-user with FileMaker Pro Server 5.5 and single-user directly on a client machine, I am convinced that I must have the server set up improperly because of the huge speed differences (I use other databases where the server version is quite quick). Normally we run the FMP Server on a PowerMac G4 QuickSilerver 867Mhz with Mac OS 10.1.5. After having this system up for some time I discovered some server disk damage and bad RAM, and have blamed that and some other issues for poor network performance. This morning I booted up the same machine under Mac OS 9.22, installed the server software, moved the database files to the Mac OS 9 partition, and still underwhelming performance. Other network activities (backup, file transfer) seem quite speedy, and the switch log doesn't show many packet errors. Setup specs: PowerMac G4 QuickSilerver 867Mhz, 1.5GB RAM, FMP cache set to maximum (40MB), HP PowerCurve 4000M switch, port set to 100baseT half-duplex, no flow control. With Mac OS 9 set to minimal set of extensions. System is set to never go to sleep. Any suggestions on performance enhancement? The application developers are surprized at the slowness of our system and assure me that other customers have zippier performance (with the exception where an iBook is being used as a server).

Since upgrading from 5.5v1 to 5.5v2 I have had two kernal crashes on the server (Mac OS X 10.1.4). Before any crashes I have also added Apple Remote Desktop client. I also run Font Reserve Server 1.5 on this machine. 1) Can I safely rip out 5.5v2 and reinstall 5.5v1? 2) Has anyone experienced any problems since upgrading the server to 5.5v2 (on a Mac OS X machine)?

My office uses a product developed in File Maker Pro 5.5. We are running FMP Server 5.5v2 on Mac OS X 10.1.4. We encounter a particular problem when using a Mac OS X client. I have spoken with the vendor and they have duplicated the problem and verified that it only occurs when both the Mac OS X client and server are running FMP 5.5. This happens with both 5.5v1 and 5.5v2, and under various version of Mac OS X. Problem: There is a database file named Contacts and it will not automatically open. When the client attepts to open this automatically the user is presented with an option to open the file manually. Manually opening does work, but makes it unrealistic to move my users to Mac OS X. Has anyone heard of anything like this happening?