With filemaker server 5 I always used a striped RAID volume, does Filemaker Server Advanced need this to?

With FMS7, the file cache limit of 40 MB does not exist anymore, and you can give as many cache to FMS7 as your server and operating system allows you to do. Therefore, having much memory on your server is a plus, and disk accesses will be reduced.

We have migrated/are still migrating a large solution to FMS7A and a new server architecture. For the moment, we decided not to a have a RAID. All the databases (about 1 GB in total) can now be held in the memory, and given that all the file references in the databases pointing to nowhere have been removed during migration, performance is increased drastically.

E.g., in FMS 5.5, we have 2 related databases, on 80 MB, the other 45 MB with related data. FMS 5.5 cache was set to the maximum of 40 MB. A large search in the related file (e.g. in the portal) or even a combined search in the master and the related file that yielded several 10'000 records was slow and took about 60 seconds, because the database has to load parts of the files from disk during the search. In FMS7, the same search takes now 5 seconds. This performance increase can be attributed in part to the server hardware (being about 5 times faster as the old one), and in part to the file cache.

Martin