I am hosting a FM database on new iMac. When I access the DB while specifying host on a remote machine the DB takes a long time to open while "summarizing" which is a summary field used to count the records. Any way around this. While on a LAN connection this takes only 10 seconds. But open remote takes about 5 minutes. Help?

Best way is not recalculate across records. Keep that value in some other database as stored number.

HTH.

This summary field "counts" all the records containing a non-empty value. Then I use this "number" in another calculation to display an average value. How do I not recalculate in the summary field?

Is there a way to have another DB "count" the number of records in a field in the original DB? ....and would this avoid the issue?

You are still thinking in terms of recalculating.

There will be always delay.

Make always-full transaction inclusive of writing new result somewhere. Database with static data will be the fastest possible one. It is just slightly more work.

"While on a LAN connection this takes only 10 seconds."

Ok, so the people using a peer-to-peer solution don't care that it takes 10 seconds. On the web, if it is going to take ten seconds, you might want to inform your clients. If it's going to take more that 10 seconds, you will want to inform your clients (if they are the general public) that there will be a delay. Of course, you are not likely to say, "This is going to take a while because good design has eluded me." If this is not for the public, but an in-house solution, just tell the worker to go get a good drink and enjoy the break.

"This summary field "counts" all the records containing a non-empty value. Then I use this "number" in another calculation to display an average value." I suppose this average value is necessary to your design. If so, then you must figure another way to achieve the answer.

Since you are looking at records which have a particular field which contains data, have you considered finding all those records and capturing that number as a token? Perhaps this could be achieved with a META Refresh - or not.

Or could you handle this in some fashion with FMP-If conditionals on your results format file. Or maybe through an inlineaction. One of the beauties of developing in FileMaker is that one usually has many choices. Perhaps this is why Anatoli said, "You are still thinking in terms of recalculating."

Apple, AFAIK, still owns FileMaker. To use Apple's good advice, 'Think Different". It can be most useful to a FileMaker developer.

Good Luck.

I'm still trying other "clever" solutions to generate the number (this is, after all, not a complex issue-I'm just trying to count the records in a field that contains values)-not exactly sequencing DNA. I will continue to find the path. I also noticed the other day that when a remote user (opens host) sorts data in a table (by name or date field) it also goes "on the clock" and takes a while to sort. I'm guessing there is no way around this either. I'll check. Thanks so far!

Why do I get the feeling that you are using IWP?

What is IWP by chance? Thanks.

Instant Web Publishing.

Unless I have missed some setting; I've never used IWP, just plain old FMP6 hosted by FMS5.5.

Did you program your pages with CDML?

That will be Custom Web Publishing.

If not, you are using IWP. And that is next to useless.