Filemaker Scalability

[Dixie]

Hi, I am new to this forum, and am not sure where to post this sort of question, so please excuse me if it's in the wrong place.

I have been asked to assess whether or not it would be possible to build a solution for my company using Filemaker 7.

Having looked at the application, I am very excited about what we will be able to do with it and the ease with which I will be able to develop our solution in it.

However, I do have one real doubt about the application and that concerns its scalability. We will need to run at least 400 users on the application and it is conceivable that anything up to 300 users would want to access the application at anyone time.

Some of these users will require access from outside of the office, so the web based functionality should server us well. If I look at the documentation on filemaker.com though it seems to suggest that this is limited to 200 users, do I understand this correctly?

Also, how many users could I put on to just a normal client server architecture, assuming that the hardware would not be a problem?

Thanks in advance for any help / information you can give me.

Dixie

[The Shadow]

The area for "FileMaker Server" would probably be the best place to find an answer for your question. Since FMS 7 hasn't been released yet, maybe you could find someone with the "preview" that will be able to shed some light on the scalability issue.

FileMaker Server 7 allows up to 250 Pro connections at a time, FMS 7 Advanced allows an additional 100 web connections (for a total of 350).

http://www.filemaker.com/products/fms_home.html

[Kurt Knippel]

The limit is 250 concurrent users on a single server. I have not yet seen a situation where Filemaker Server would not scale. It is designed from the workgroup perspective, where as systems like Oracle (scalable to millions of users) is totally designed from the enterprise perspective.

This just means that you need to think in terms of the workgroup first. So you might actually have several distinct application groups, which you can split across 2 or 3 different servers. This would give you up to 750 Filemaker users, plus 300 web users.

I currently maintian a facility with 5 Filemaker Server. We did this for both load balancing as well as the sheer number of databases that we have (over 1000), though we only have a few users.

I used to work for a facility that server more than 300 users across an entire state. We had 3 or 4 Filemaker Server, mostly due to load balancing.

[Dixie]

captkurt said:

I used to work for a facility that server more than 300 users across an entire state. We had 3 or 4 Filemaker Server, mostly due to load balancing.

Would each server be replicated with the other so that a user using server 1 could see the data that was held on server 3?

Given that I would need this to happen would I need to consider an enterprise solution?

Thanks

[Kurt Knippel]

We actually split the databases into smaller functional groupings. I do not remember exactly how is was organized, but it was something like

Server 1 - Login, Preference, Lookup and Library files

Server 2 - Contact Management files

Server 3 - Order Processing, Billing and Invoicing files

Server 4 - extra files and low priority sub systems

and so on...

It was actually more complicated than this due to load balancing. Like server 4 had a full 125 files, while Server 2 only had 3 files that were very heavily used. But the above is a good way to start.

[dkemme]

With the above example, if you have four servers with different files hosted, do you really get four times as many users that can use the system? If each user needs to use files on each server and each server can only host 250 clients, you have not increased the number of users.

[Vaughan]

Each file hosted on FMS can still only support 250 simultaneous users.

[Will]

Okay now I'm confused. For FileMaker 7 server this link http://www.filemaker.com/products/fms_home.html

states the following for FileMaker Server 7 - "Share databases with up to 250 users" So, does this mean 250 users concurrently for the entire server as Kapt. Curt says? Or could I have two seperate databases hosted on the same server with 250 unique users connected to database 1 and 250 different concurrent users connected to database 2 which Vaughn seems to imply? Apologies if I have misinterpreted anyone.

Also, the same link for Server 7 Advanced states "Share FileMaker solutions over the web with up to 100 users" Again, 100 total or 100 per web-enabled database?

[Kurt Knippel]

Unless something has changed (which it might have) it is 250 concurrent users for the server.

Likewise it is 100 concurrent web connections per server, but this is different than users, since a constant connection is not maintained.

[stanley]

Will:

I was going to write the same thing as Kurt earlier, but then I looked at the FMI site. For FMS 7, they write: "Allow up to 250 users to simultaneously connect to a hosted database," which makes it sound as though they've changed the limit to a per-file limit. Then, however, they write (in the next line) "support more than 250 users, if simultaneous usage of databases is not required because idle users can be disconnected automatically," which makes it sound as though the limit is still the same, i.e., 250 concurrent connections to the server as a whole. There's nothing in the FMS 7 FAQ, but I'd put my money on the limit being on the server, rather than on a per-file basis...

-Stanley

[JerrySalem]

OK, now I am confused.

Lets say I have a solution that I am trying to see to a client. The client says, "I have 500 salespersons, and they all have to access the system at the same time"

Is this even possible? How? (I thought using load balancing, whatever that is it could be done)

Jerry

[Vaughan]

"I have 500 salespersons, and they all have to access the system at the same time"

If they really truly need 500 simultaneous users, then it'll have to be done in something other than FMP. Oracle or MySQL or something. Which will naturally put the development time and cost into another socio-economic stratum.