We are running a business soultion with 140 concurrent users.

It

RE: This means that the server is not the bottleneck

It can be, possibly reindexing something, reclaiming space after deletion of many records, flushing cache, doing backup etc.

It can be slightly corrupted file. It can be bad design with lot of dynamic values, which need to be calculated

It can be almost anything.

Yes maybe but,

Reindexing must be done even if You are only one user logged into the FM server.

And when adding records only being logged in myself, it

Well there is one possibility here that is both a pro and a con for Filemaker. Filemaker is very dynamic. As soon as a record is created it is available for ALL users. They get it as fast as the network can carry the signal, indexes get updated, etc. However that comes with a speed drawback, and this is especially appearant when you are NOT working with found sets, but all working with all records.

Try implementing a system where everyone MUST use found sets, even go so far as to put them into find mode as soon as they open the db, this might improve the performance.

What is the OS?

WELCOME TO MY WORLD!

My configuration involves approx 150 Macs and 1 FMP 5.5 server running on Mac OS 9. I experience severe performance issues when FileMaker grinds to a halt nearly every day. Here's my situation...

Within the same three hour window each week, nearly all users complete a data submission which involves:

(1) Importing about 150 records each into "file A"

(2) Updating another 150 records in "File B"

(3) Deleting the original 150 records in "File A"

I have tried the "blank layout" and "found set" solutions only to discover that nothing could prevent this problem that comes as quickly as it goes.

***And you want to know the strangest part?

***I can temporarily FIX EVERYTHING by closing ANY open file on the server.

It doesn't even have to be a file that anyone has ever opened. In fact, I place a "dummy" file on the server and leave it open. Whenever users get tired of waiting and physically walk to my office to find me, all I do is close this "dummy" file and the system returns to normal for a short while.

Another thing...I have found that you can only close the files from the actual server--the remote administration feature won't speed things up.

I have my money on this being a server bug.

But anyway, please give me your thoughts. I just installed OS X on my FileMaker Server, and so I will see if this may have just been an OS 9 bug.

FM server is quite slow on Mac OS 9. Mac OS is without multithreading and just with collaborative multitasking.

My best advice is Linux FM server or Windows.

FM server is usually not robust enough on Mac X.