Speed Issues Over VPN

[daveblack]

Hi Guys, Wonder if anyone can guide me here.

Im a very experienced FM developer, and over the last couple of years have developed a very complete private medical insurance calculator for a customer of mine. Without going into too much detail it basically calculates medical insurance costs for 15 different companies and allows you to compare the costs. On a 100Mbp network it takes around 25-30 seconds to do a full calculation. These arnt very complicated, basically lots of lookups that create around 200 extra records per customer running the quote.

Now the problem is, over a VPN (broadband 512kb download 256k upload) this quote takes over 10 minutes, which is a disaster. Does anyone know sources for speeding up filemaker in general? The main problem I can see is a single database ive called LineItems, this stores each individual company quote, so you get about 200 extra records per quote. This database is about 216meg in size with currently 1.4million records, each records only has around 10 fields.

When opening this file over the vpn it takes ages, why is that? it has no layouts and dosnt run any scripts on opening, so why does filemaker take so long to open it up? I cant see that it transfers the 216meg over as it opens quicker than the couple of hours that would take. This may not be the main problem, but it would be a start.

Does anyone know anything about what traffic filemaker puts across a network? This may allow me to optimise my system. Im using FM6 with server. What processing gets done client side and server side when running scripts?

Think ill stop there, enough for one post! Thanks for anyone who can point me at some resources about this vast topic.

Dave.

[Vaughan]

How is the file shared... with FM Server? Or on a shared network volume?

The answer to most "speeding up remote access" type questions seems to be Terminal Services or Citrix. Keep all the data processing on the host machine, just pass screen, keyboard and mouse data through the network.

[daveblack]

Hi, I did put in the post im using FM6 with server.

Yeah ive got some other customers using vnc as remote access to a pc, but ive gone down a different route now and have opened up a whole can of worms that id like answered. Mainly, why does that single file take so long to open? I admit it is large in size, but I cant believe for one minute that FM Server moves any of that data around just for the hell of it when you open the file. There must be some white papers or docs somewhere that specify what FM does on the network whilst its operating - or documents that go through optimising FM for narrow band networks?

Thanks for your reply.

[David McQueen]

I have 3 projects on WAN's now. Two on FMP5-6 and one FM7 using VPN. There is a lot of work being done at the client end using FMP5-6. There was substantial enough improvment on one project, that we went directly to FMP7, never deploying in FMP5-6. So that is another way to go aside from Citrix or Terminal Server.

Also IWP in FMP 7 offers much more flexability that previous versions.

Regarding you 216 meg, 1.4 million record file....Are the fields in this file indexed. If an index has to be built on opening, this would slow things down.

Is a portal to these records shown on your main opening layout, especially a portal that potentially shows all records. This will take a long time to process.

Do you have sorts going on in the portals. This has been a real problem on WANs.

In general, minimize the number of records displayed in portals. Not only what actually shows in the portal, but what can be seen in the portal if one scrolls.

Minimize the number of records being shown in a list view.

Try to come into the program on a layout with the absolute minimum of information on it.

Realize that the pipe is relatively small and keep the amount that has to go through small.

Watch your 1.4 million record file. I had a project with similar amounts of records, but more fields. As soon as we tried to do operations on the total record space, we blew the file out of the water. The operations were building indices that blew it past the 2 Gig level. We had about 500 megs of records.

HTH

Dave McQueen

[Ender]

why does that single file take so long to open?

I believe it's opening the indexes. For files with hundreds of thousands of records this takes longer, especially over a WAN. If you can remove the indexes on fields where they aren't needed, it may help. Or purge old records.

FYI: In FM7, this is no longer an issue. Even large files open pretty quickly.

In general, WAN performance in FM5/6 is pretty slow. There are tricks to improving performance of certain things. If you can say more about the process involved in generating a quote, we may be able to give you some ideas.

[daveblack]

Thanks Ender, I will run some tests on the speed of indexes on vs indexes off. It sounds like a bloody good point though, and fits all the citeria of my problem!

Thanks also Mr McQueen, all of your points are valid but dont apply for this instance, thanks though for your responce.

[daveblack]

Good idea, but no result, the file takes 5 minutes to open via a vpn, I found it had 3 indicies which wernt really being used so i removed them. it then took 4 minutes 45 seconds to open up. compared to a file to similar structure with only 10 records that takes 3 seconds to open. So im back to being a bit dumbstruck as to why this larger file takes longer to open? what exactly is the client of filemaker doing???