By
daveinc
Hi,
I have a performance conundrum that I have not been able to figure out for the past month and a half or so and am looking here for some guidance.
We have a 9-year old FM system that we run our entire Production operation on. We have approximately 150 users in 9 locations across the US and Canada for this solution.
We have a Windows Server 2012 VM with 14 CPU Cores, 60GB RAM, and an SSD Array SAN that we run our Production Server on. We have separate Drives configured for the Operating System and Data. All users not in the facility housing the server use Remote Desktop to access the system.
The design of this system is not optimal for performance, but it has been running very well for the last 2 years (until early February 2020).
In early February, it began to stall no matter what we did when we had more than 120 users or so connected and working normally.
We identified several severely taxing actions, mainly Finds on related tables with millions of records, and eliminated those. No luck.
We added unnecessary extra CPUs, RAM, and Disk space to no avail.
We created a completely new VM with a fresh install of FM Server 16. No love.
Finally in desperation, we moved the server to older, slower hardware with non-SSD hard drive array and voila! the system works fine again.
This older VM is similar in every other way: Windows Server 2012, 14(slower) CPU Cores, 60GB(slower)RAM, FastSCSI Disk Array.
As an anti-bonus, in thinking this would be temporary, we have both the OS and the Data on a single C drive on this older hardware.
It works splendidly on this lesser setup.
We had all variety of hardware experts in to make sure the newer/faster setup was performing correctly. We updated all firmware and restarted the whole setup.
All benchmark tests show the newer system to be considerably faster in all phases, especially Disk.
We have no problems with any other VMs on this newer/faster setup(including some less intensive Filemaker Servers).
The one thing that occurs on the newer/faster machine that DOES NOT happen on the older/slower one, is that it stalls and the Disk is consumed by writing tons of data to FMTEMPFM* files for an extended period of time while there is no increase in data being written to the .fmp12 files.
This particular FM Server and dataset is the only one that this happens to. We have two other FM Servers on there that have 200 plus users 24 hours a day and nary an issue.
Does anyone know what is happening when the Disk Monitor shows the System Process is writing tons of data to FMTEMPFM files and not writing any more data than normal to the .fmp12 files?
Thanks in advance for any guidance.
Dave
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