Help Filemaker Server is running really slow.

[manowar]

Hi guys,

I'm totally new to this form. I have a very disturbing and ongoing problem. Beofre I start going in to the details I want to give you guys some info. We use FM in our company as our main Data Base. We have over 200 users but not all of them logged in to filemaker at once. Usually we have 160-180 users in the system. We run FM Server 5.5 on Windows 2000 Server. The PC that we are using is a Compaq Proliant with dual Zeon Processor 2.8, 1gb of ram and a raid system and it's a dedicated server with no additional server service running on it.

Last 1.5 years we had to move the FM database to differnt computers 3 times and even to a different OS playforms because of the same performance problem. We used to use a Windows 2000 Server computer and in time FM got very slow and we had to kick all the users out and restart the system almost everyday.We thought since FM is an Apple product, it might work very goon on an Apple Computer. We got a G4 Server with OSX and run the FM on it without any problems for 4-5 months and it got slower again! Same thing happend everyday and we decided to go back to Windows Platform. We used a regular P4 computer with a Raid 5 box attached to it and moved the FM Database. As if it was a mirracle it started to run really fast for about another 4-5 months and later on it got slower again. BTW it is not slow all the time usually it gets slower during our peak hours. Filemaker.exe is using the 80-90% of system resources and everybody gets stuck. The only way to solve it is to kick everybody out and restart the computer. For the third time we decided to get a very fast server for FM and got the Compaq Proliant Server. It has been working great for 5 months and once again I have been having this performance problem. Everything is same! It gets slower durung the day, cpu usage of filemaker.exe is high and everybody gets stuck.

When we move the database over to a new computer we don't do anything we just move the files. I don't think the prgramming part is bad because it works great for 4-5 months everytime without any single problem.

Is there any suggetions that you can make to overcome this situation?

[Anatoli]

Dual processor machine is for nothing. FM runs only on single CPU.

Raid 5 is not the best.

Windows Server license is not necessary, we are using W2000 client.

Your problem lies probably somewhere with temporary files and with disk fragmentation.

FMS is fastest on Windows and Linux. Maybe on OSX as well.

[stanley]

There were a bunch of responses to this before the reversion to the old backup here on the forums. However, I wondered if the problem had been solved, or was still ongoing... You still out there Manowar?

-Stanley