oliverm

They wont help because they believe the problem is at this end, despite us showing them graphs, stats, any amount of information, and despite the speed issue only showing itself in FM. Anyway, back to the point in hand, is there a way to turn on more verbose logging on FMS/FMPro ? Olly

we dont have access to the actual code or anything, we are just end users. However we need to get evidence about the issue to send to the vendor to finally get them interested. It does appear to be just in Filemaker that this issue occurs, hence our interest in analysing that.

Is there anyway that I can turn on Debug logging in FM Server 9 or 10 so that I can find out more about what's happening when an FM client is pulling out data? We have an FM CMS which is running slowly, and despite months of work, we have ended up doing the Filemaker debugging ourselves as the vendor doesnt appear to be interested. I'm keen to know more about what data is being sent to the client, and whether any errors may be occuring, when the FM clients go to a particular screen in the CMS app. I've turned on all the logging options I can see in the FMS Admin app, but that doesnt tell me much at all. I'm after something more...verbose. Any ideas? Olly

Its on the server, in the C:program filesfilemakerfm serverdatabases folder (more or less). We've opened it in p2p mode and it does the same thing. v10 made it a bit quicker, but not a lot. Olly

Interestingly (perhaps not), we installed a trial of FMS10 on teh server and it has shown a speed improvement over the DB running in FMS9. It's still slow in my opinion, but faster than it was. It's very weird. If you have the FMPro window open, and a popup appears in front of it (say a new message alert from MSN or Twitter or Outlook or something), when it disappears there will be a white box where the popup was which stays there until the app suddenly starts responding again. Olly

Ted, We've checked all that. Replaced the switches, both NICs in the server, all the cables. We've also tried a new 'server' (was a high spec workstation but good enough for a test) which incidentally also had differnet network cards in it. Also, any form of network testing you do comes back fine. We can load the network cards, shovel data around without any issue. We can even run FMP against the DB on the network via a folder share and it runs fine. Turn on FM Server and it dies. It has to be said that it's far far far far slower than any network speed issue can account for.

Tried to, but each time we open the DB on a workstation (before we share it) it says it's already open by another user on that machine and it can't be shared, even though we haven't opened it on that machine before. Even tried it on a new workstation, did the same thing. As a result we can't share it and subsequently can't view it in the Open Remote screen of other machines.

Well, reinstalling the server didnt help. I tried p2p on a workstation with the database and got an error each time saying that the database was already being shared (despite copying the data from the network to a number of workstations and trying it on there). I think I have officially given up :S

Yep, which we did, using FM Pro 9 installed on the server machine (after removing FMS9 from the box). Other users on the network had the same speed issues. The server has been re-installed and if we can get hold of the software company to restore the DBs back then we should be able to test it this morning (not that i think re-installing the server will do much).

Ok, opening the database on the server using FM9 and then enabling sharing->Filemaker Network, then opening the database on other FM clients using Open Remote....doesnt help. It's still slow as a dog. However, if we open the database directly on client machines (ie pointing FM9 to FM-serverfmdb-sharefm-db, the system runs perfectly. Of course then we can only have one user at a time working on the system. Time for a re-install

Trying a total reinstall and a look at our options this afternoon. Olly

oh yeah, tried that too :)

Hi Genx, Yep, we've tried that. Grabbed a new workstation from stock, with just XP SP3 on it and FMPro 9. File, Open -> Remote, chose the server and the database. That's how we open it anyway. Olly

Well, we've swapped out the server and installed FMS on a new workstation. Not a perfect test, but as there database is new and almost empty the strain shouldnt be too great. Guess what? It was still really slow. The VOIP switches do have QOS on them but unless FM/FMS uses some kind of special dedicated protocol and packet type then they should be fine. We can move files, ftp, load-test the FM server over the network till we are blue in the face and it's absolutely normal. Us FM pointed at it and it just crawls. Are there any particular registry or firewall requirements that are needed for FMS 9 ? Olly

Hi chaps, We have just had setup a new CRM package based around Filemaker Pro 9. However, the entire system runs like a dog. I mean slow, really slow. A list of to-do items (coloured text) containing some 20 entries may take around 2 minutes to appear in full. Each entry showing after about 2 to 4 seconds. We get lots of "not responding" when waiting for different screen within the CRM app to load, which again can take minutes. One user this morning timed how long it took to show a drop down menu list of around 10 items from a form on one of the pages, that took 19 seconds to fully show it's contents. Now, we've been working with the CRM vendor who are miffed by the speed issues. The FM server is running on a Windows 2003 R2 32 bit server, 4GB of ram, Single Dual Core Xeon processor, lots of disk space (250GB spare at the mo). The performance charts for the servers processor, memory and disk queues (read and write) are so low as to be non-existant (processor averages around 3%, memory averages around 900mb used and disk queues are averaging around 0.5) and it's fair to say it's idling for most of the time. The workstations are XP and Vista. Various specs from single P4 up to multiple dual core processors, with 1GB minimum ram and up to 4GB. We have setup a brand new workstation running nothing but XP Sp3 and the CRM app (FM Pro 9). No AV, no search, no office. That also runs like a hound. We've updated all the drivers, firmware and bios on the server, and the event log shows nothing wrong at all. All the diags for the disk subsystem and network cards come back as fine, and we have also tried all the three network cards that are on the server, in turn, and clustered. We have also swapped out the switch (the sharp end of £1000 of 3com gigabit voip hardware) for another one and replaced all the cables. Given that neither us or the vendor can find an issue with the infrastructure or hardware I think it has to be a server OS issue or a FM9 issue. Is there anything anyone can suggest from an FM point of view that we could try ? The only thing I have found online so far is that we should up the database cache to its max on the FM server which we have done (its at 800mb and wont go higher). If it's simple stuff to try I'll do it myself, but otherwise I'll make a list and thrust it in to the hand of the vendors support bods who dares come on site next. HELP!?! O.