Is Filemaker Pro 7 much slower than version 6

[skandalamophana]

How can you change the amount of memory?

on a windows server 2003?

This is the solution i need!

Greetings -

256MB is the recomended amount of memory for our usage.

At 512MB the backup took 22 minutes to complete and we basically got lots of coffee cups.

At 2GB (we added some memory) the backup took 2 minutes to complete and we do not even notice.

Welcome to the ---real--- world.

Hope That Helps.

[Robert_Artigas]

Greetings -

We had 1 memory stick of 512MB installed on the computer. We bought 3 additional 512MB memory sticks and installed them.

In other words we upgraded the hardware.

Hope That Helps.

[MattPage]

We are going from v5 to v7 and I am noticing some problems with speed. We have a layout with 5 portals on it and in v5 the screen refreshed immediatly as you browsed records. It now flickers and pauses for a second before all the portals are displayed, which basically means you can not quickly click through the records one by one.

I have a feeling the boss will shoot me if after spending

[Robert_Artigas]

Greetings -

If you have not already done so, please read all the way from the beginning of the thread.

Portals and dropdown lists are a real problem (in this and other forums) and someone posted here that the Filemaker folks are looking for a solution.

Calculated fields and Summary fields are sometimes giving problems and in the case of summary fields are dog slow (this was reported and discussed at length in another forum).

In this thread, there are a whole bunch of items that can help some with the speed problems, but they hit or miss, eventually there has got to be a solution posted by the FM folks.

Make sure you have updated the client to V3 and the server to v2. Some individuals in this thread have reported fixing of the problems. Clean up your file references.

But if something helps or not is very specific to each site.

Here are the links to the other forums:

http://talk.markjeffords.com/fmtalk/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1121

http://talk.markjeffords.com/fmtalk/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1112

Please note that it might me usefull to look at other threads in those forums besided the one that I have posted above.

Hope That Helps

[BruceJ]

Here;s my unsolicited advice:

To me it never made sense to "upgrade" your solution by converting it from an older version.

Instead, go the painstaking route of building it from the ground up in v7, learning as you go. Then, import the data.

You'll end up with a "pure" v7 solution and avoid many of the pitfalls that are inherrent, but not apparent in converting from a previous version.

I've done this on several large enterprise solutions. It took several months of hard work, but that pales in comparison to the time and energy I spent trying to fix converted solutions - that I ended up giving up on.

It's a bummer that you can't run Server 5.5 and Server 7 on the same machine. This is the only reason I can see to being "forced" to convert a v5 or v6 solution. However, if resources permit, I'd still advocate stricking with the orignally designed version - even to the point of running another server for the other version. (I run both versions in one of my larger environments, one runs Server 5.5 the other v7).

[Robert_Artigas]

Greetings Bruce -

I appreciate the feedback. But I did not have the choice. 70+ files, 350+ layouts, 80+ customer data pulls. Those customer data pulls are scheduled through the month (some every week) and billing is based on the production work. We track a complete industry and have a whole department that feeds the database. I get the data out to our customers.

I had to come in on a weekend and do the conversions. The clean-up the problems over the following weeks. This happened while the solution was live and production work continued.

The solution is working properly now since several production cycles have been done. A bit slow in some drop downs, and some re-work of some calculated fields. We optimized everything that we could. Data pulls are taking about the same time, or less. Not too bad considering everything. We could be happier, but that will happen as the FM7 folks work out some of the speed problems.

You ---gave up--- on your conversion. I ---completed--- my conversion. And I got mine working. And the time that it took me to solve the problems (on and off for about two weeks or so) were a lot less that reworking the solution for several months.

I posted as I solved the problems so others would not have to go through what I did.

As I get a change I will re-work into a new FM7 application. In the meantime we are still very profitable.

[BruceJ]

Robert -

Glad to hear you got 'er up and running better after your conversion.

My solution was just about as hefty as yours was (about 45 files, 100's of scripts and layouts) - It had been years since I built it and couldn't get my mind around it again to clean it up. You're much braver than I

The opportunity to build it from scratch gave me achance to correct some of the inherrent design flaws that I'd been working around for so many years.

I've been thrilled with the results and now take full advantage of v7s features. Many of which I had wirked around in v6. The best part is, I'm slightly wiser for all the blood sweat and tears taht went into this endeavor.

[Gosub]

I hate to beat a dead horse here, but a frustration I'm having (beyond those already stated) when working on a layout is that simply clicking anywhere on the layout - on a field, label or even a blank space - causes FMD7v3 to pause for a brief moment. Just clicking causes it to pause - not evening trying to move a field or anything, and while a 'brief moment' might not sound like a big deal, when you're used to moving quickly and freely on layout design, it becomes maddening.

Per suggestion, I've upped the cache to 64MB and set the cache to save every 10min. I'm working on a P4 laptop with 512MB RAM, Win2K Pro SP4, and while this machine may not be the fastest screamer on the block, I never had this frustration -- or anything even close to it -- with FMv6.

I'm really just now sitting down to learn FM7 by re-building a solution from scratch, and I won't say I'm hugely disappointed with the new software, but I will say if FM doesn't get some of these issues ironed out soon it's going to drive me crazy. Building layouts has always been one of my favorites activities with FileMaker (all the way back to pre-Pro FileMaker), but now it's so painful it's beginning to turn me off of wanting to learn the new software at all.

-Gosub/Stever

[BruceJ]

When I first inastalled v7, I got the same irritating lag. It wasn't much, just really frustrating if you're going to spend 10 hours a day working with it.

After w ashort while, I couldn't stand to work with it - especially in layout mode where moving objects around was "sticky".

This experience was consistent across many machines working with local files - Windoze XP, Windoze 2000, and OSX. However, I can't honestly say that I recall the moment things snapped into place and the issue was resolved, but I do know that I updated to the latest patch, defragmaneted the HDs and somehow the stickyness went away. Like I said, I can't recall the thing I did - just that now it's working fine.

My gut tells me it had to do with the update, but if that was the case, your issue woudl be fixed. I'd try a few off the wall things like defragmenting, chaing the monitors refresh rate, reinstall/update the video driver, etc.

I hear your pain - I can't work with the laggy, sticky applications either.

[Reed]

I've seen this layout mode slowness as well, but only on my lowest-end windows box (a PII 400). This has persisted through all the updates on this machine. No problems like this on the other machines (G3 400, 500; G4 533, 1000; G5 1800; P3 733; P4 1500, 1600, 2000) The only thing I can think in my case is the PII video uses shared memory....

[Ted S]

The layout mode stickiness went away for me when I installed a higher-end video card. It was really annoying and couldn't stand it anymore so I upgraded. Just another cost of doing business I guess.

[Mirko]

I think that many people have seen this kind of behavior...FM 7 "appears" to be slower, I think due to the new graphics engine.

Im wondering if "the new Graphics engine" was a pre war design.

Such a shame to handicap what could be a superb product...

-- wishing I did not make the decision to upgrade our server and stations --