FM Unlimited crashing - please help

[Gary Bernstein]

I am hoping someone can help. We have been running FMP Unlimited 5.5 on Mac OS 9 on a Blue and White G3/400 for several years without any problems. We have about 24 databases open. The primary means of access is from our webserver which is using Lasso 6. This week, I moved all the databases to a different hard drive (installed in the same machine - removed the old one) which is running Mac OS X 10.3.5 with FMP Unlimited 5.5 still. It has been crashing about once or twice a day since. I have a crash log, but it might as well be in chinese - if it would help, I'll provide it.

Any ideas on what might be causing the crash? I've bumped up the cache to the max. I've added memory. I'm at a loss as to what to try.

Thanks

-Gary

[Vaughan]

Are you running FMP 5.5 native OS X, or under Classic mode? Classic mode is probably not a good idea.

FMP 6 is most stable with Mac OS X. Put FMP 5.5 back onto MacOS 9 (not Classic mode) and it'll probably be fine again.

If you want to persist with FMP 5.5 make sure you are using the latest application patch level, and latest version of Web Companion.

[Gary Bernstein]

Thanks for the info. Although I was hoping for a better fix. I am going to evaluate my options on going back to OS 9 but I think I am going to meet some resistance from the security group who says that I need to be running a supported OS for security reasons. Will FMP-U 6 work with FMP Server 5.5? Also, can I still buy FMP-U 6? or do I have to buy 7 (which will not happen any time soon).

Thanks again

-Gary

[Gary Bernstein]

Oops. I forgot to mention that I am running FMP -U native in OS X.

-Gary

[Vaughan]

FMP 6 will work with Server 5.5.

FMPU and FMS aren't running on the same computer are they? That's a really bad idea...

[Gary Bernstein]

Nope. I learned that lesson years ago. Thanks though.

[Steve T.]

Hi, GB! Yeah, the whole Unlimited crashing-thing is still a mystery AFAIK, but folks have come up with various band-aids to deal with it and there seems to be a number of causes, not just one. There are at least a couple threads on it.

RE: FM7

FM7 changes FM web publishing and CDML has been eliminated... better make sure you CAN easily migrate to 7 before going out and getting it.

--ST

[JLauver]

I may be experiencing similar problems with FM 5.5 unlimited. I posted a question on the IWP forum but didn't get any responses. IWP shuts down after editing three records in form view. Upon choosing to edit a fourth record an error notice appears telling you the data base has shut down and is not available. In FM everything looks normal and works fine. In order to get IWP back up I need to restart the program and it will then go thru the same cycle again. The error log states " An exception has occured! Most likely FMPro ran out of memory for this request. Try relaunching FMPro with more memory." At first I thought the crashes were related to bad data formats, but I discovered it does it every three times regardless of the record or date being updated. I followed some of the other threds in this forum, but did not see this specific type of crashing described. Although I am running FM on Windows I wonder if your crashes are related to IWP. I am going crazy trying to find the answer to this and the best I can tell I am running all of the most current updates. I do not know what type of memory PM is reffering to as I have increased the cache memory as much as possible.

[nikh]

I just wanted to pass along this fix for my crashing:

I'm using FMU 6.0v1 on a G4, dual 1.42MHz, 1024MB running Mac OSX 10.2.8 and have been having a tough time troubleshooting some random quitting (and subsequent database corruption). I'm using the Web Companion and CDML to access my 10 databases. I managed to get a 100% reproducible call to fmpro that would cause it to quit: a simple '-view' action tag <http://myhost/FMPro?-db=listings.fp5&-lay=generic&-error=errors.htm&-format=new.htm&-token=new&-view=New...>.

I'm using the Web Security database for some simple authentication and that was the solution. One particular user doing this one particular call, was causing the quit. All other (8) users doing the same call, didn't cause the quit. I did nothing else other than delete the record then recreate it in Web Users_.fp5 and my problem appears to have disappeared. Had to share...

[donntarris]

I'm using FMPro Unlimited 5.5 on OS X Panther 10.3.8 with the latest updates for all and am experiencing a crash perhaps once or twice a day. FMPro either quits, or hangs with the spinning ball.

The security database you're using, does it require a user to have a username and password to access?

I'd rather keep my web display free and easy. My worry is that FileMaker Inc will not "fix" the program in that version because of its age, and yet it was one that was very flexible with other applications like the old Claris Home Page to begin web development by placing fields within html, etc.

Someone mentioned in another post that Windows (urgghh) would be more stable. What a terrible thought, but any confirmation out there? Thanks in advance!

[andyjohnson]

Hi, Everyone,

We're using FMU 6.0 V4 on OS 10.3.8 Server using the CDML pages. We have about 8 databases, the largest one has 12,000 records (and climbing). The others are mostly much smaller. We were experiencing one or two crashes per day, normally when a user accessed the db. There didn't seem to be much of a pattern except that the most heavily used one seemed to crash the most. Sometimes it appeared to crash when someone was looking, other times when someone was posting. I think.

We reconstructed our empty structure files and imported the data into these "clean" dbs, and this seems to have helped but it's still crashing, once every 2 or 3 days. So I've hunted around and found this thread. Since we've installed the most recent WC that has been mentioned, and have tried to make pristine dbs, we're now in a quandary.

1) What were some of the fixes that seemed to help you, Steve? Are there any other recent threads? Wait, I have more questions!

2) Is it possible to transfer corruption by importing data from a .fp5 file? Or using comma delimited text?

3) OSX Server comes with SQL and PHP. What if we tried moving to that instead? Would we regret it? What's the level of complexity in learning how to use it? Is it more reliable?

Sorry, I'm full of questions and I have few answers.

[Steve T.]

Howdy, A! Where the heck is Spearfish?

(1) fixes? No, no fixes but we set crontab to reboot every day and tried to reduce the load on the server; we've also started serving from apache for all the static pages and :8080 for fm stuff

(2) corrution through data? I doubt it but you can use something like BBEdit to "zap gremlins" if you're worried about invisible characters and want to play it safe

(3) We have had nothing but good experiences with PHP/MySQL for our web-only projects. No crashes, no errors, and we don't have to leave the computer logged in as a user since apache runs on the system level instead of the user level. It took me a whole summer to learn and build a complex web calendar with user-submitted posts, but I'm glad I invested the time and did so. It's real programming and coding, though, so if you're not comfortable with variables, arrays, functions, and loops, I wouldn't recommend it. I used to rely on Dreamweaver and a little CDML to do my sites.. now I spend most of my development time in BBEdit. Here's a copy/paste of some typical php code (but it'll probably be missing all my beautiful indents)....

if ($pageresult)

{

$pagecount = mysql_num_rows($pageresult);

switch($pagecount)

{

case 0:

break;

case 1:

while ($pagerec = mysql_fetch_array($pageresult))

{

$pageid = $pagerec['pageid'];

$pagename = $pagerec['pagename'];

$pagetitle = $pagerec['pagetitle'];

$pagefilename = $pagerec['pagefilename'];

$pagedescription = $pagerec['pagedescription'];

$pcreated = $pagerec['pcreated'];

$pcreator = $pagerec['pcreator'];

$pmodified = $pagerec['pmodified'];

$pmodifier = $pagerec['pmodifier'];

}

break;

default:

echo ("PAGE SELECTION ERROR " . mysql_error() . "<br> n");

}

}

Check out the PHP section of the forums for more and to see if it's something you want to try. For me, it was well worth it even though I was forced to take my web development to a new level.

--ST

[andyjohnson]

Steve,

Thanks for your reply. Spearfish is at the base of South Dakota's Black Hills on I-90.

Things are now looking a little better for us in the FMU6 department. We discovered (by talking to a FM support person) that we hadn't updated FMU6 to the final version. Doing this reduced the crashes to about once per day. Then we (finally) turned on our firewall and FM has now been running for a week without crashing. (Although it restarts nightly - we wrote an applescript that quits FM, backs up the dbs to another disk, records errors, and restarts the server. iCal runs the applescript for us).

My question now is, could adding a firewall stop FM from crashing? What could have been going on to make it crash?? Guess I need to see if there is anything in a log. . .

We're waiting for a high use period to find out just how stable the system now is.

We still count this as a short-term solution. The long term solution is to move to php and sql. Thanks very much for the report, and for the link and your example. Hopefully we're up to the coding.

[Vaughan]

Don't just update the FMP program: there is a separate updater for Web Companion as well.

[mlindal]

We have fixed our crashing FM unlimited after nearly 2 years of trouble shooting.

The answer was very simple:

In our passwords / Access privileges ...

Our WebPassword set had:

Available menu commands = 'none'

When we changed that 'normal' everything worked fine.

There was a script that in the right situation would go into an infinite loop after searching the database.

The only thing we could do was to reboot the FM unlimited once or twice a day when it went up to 99% of CPU time.

For what it is worth, I thought I would log this here.