Optimising speed of Portal based databases

[mattlight]

Hi guys - quick question -

Is there a way of optimising the speed of portals that only have 12 rows and vertical scroll bar?

In the portal row I have one repeating field, and two other fields and it keeps on refreshing the screen sooooooo slowly and then when I click off the screen it does it again - it's NOT BIG but it's not QUICK either!!

Why it feels the need to adjust non affected data I just don't know! Surely there's away of stopping rows recalculating their freshness if they are not affected by any updates - it wants to update the entire portal link which is tedious!! When I'm showing a database to a client, I don't want them to think that it's slow from the first record created - they'll think it's down hill from here!!!

Any suggestions?

Cheers

[Rigsby]

I

[Vaughan]

Big portal speed-up hint -- don't specify the relationship to sort.

Also, why are you using repeating foelds in a protal? Or did I miss something?

[mattlight]

The reason I am using a repeating field is because of the previous post in this forum from me. The repeating field is a time scale with 24 intervals (30 minutes each) which gets listed in the portal horizontally. depending on the time and duration of the appointment it displays an expanded pixel graphic of either yellow, red, blue, grey or if time slot available, BLANK. The colour only changes because of a value field on the appointment screen

YELLOW = Booking

RED = Waiting to be seen

BLUE = With Doctors

GREY = Doctor Time Off

I'll be testing out how removing SORTING improves the speed (thanks for the reply with that suggestion) but I'm sure there are other basics in improving the speed of viewing a portal.

I just wish it would only refresh the portal line that has been altered and not feel the need to refresh the entire portal box. Look at Microsoft Outlook at their Scheduler and you'll see instant updating of relevant information. I'm sure this program (Outlook) is a self contained written PROGRAM and not a database running under an enviroment like Filemaker but I didn't expect such a MAJOR speed difference!

When I go onto the Filemaker website and download example solutions for Filemaker, I noticed that some of these are self contained programs so my other question is - can you convert a filemaker database solution (once completely tried and tested) into a PROGRAM that writes to a series or relivant line entry databases? (Do you know what I mean - can't put it any better!)

Thanks for your help so far, any answers will be greatly appreciated!

[Rigsby]

I just responded to your other post, and could have dealt with this there, actually. But anyway

[mattlight]

Yes - correct! Tried and tested - by using a lookup instead of a calculation that gets repetition from a container field it makes it 300% faster