FMS 7 dual processor

[V]

Hi all!

We've just bought a new fms advanced and we've read about using one processor to serve our databases in our LAN and the other one for WPE.

I'd like to know if you could use both processor to serve databases in the LAN, I'm afraid not,...

Are you able to serve several databased stored in several servers?

Any comments?

[Martin Brändle]

You can split up your databases on several servers, if you want to (and have the money).

We use a two server setup as you described, one server for DBs, the other for WPE/CWP, but for reduncancy we have everything (e.g. FMS + A) installed on both machines, but one component is sleeping. If one server fails, we can move both tasks to one machine and wake the second component up.

See also this thread

[V]

It could be misunderstood, I mean I want to use a G5 dual processor to serve databases for our fm clients. Now we're serving some databases but Server Admin shows that one processor is not working very hard, I suppose it is used to run OS,...

[Martin Brändle]

Well, the components of FMS7A are said to be multithreading (check with Activity Monitor). The OS is distributing the workload (i.e. the threads) on both CPUs.

My experience is such that the WPE uses more CPU time than the database server itself, unless in the latter case you redefine calculation fields that have to recalculated then or you do a large import.

[scott_m29]

My FM Server7 Advanced WPE is not working, and in researching the error message "an unexpected error occurred", the FileMaker Knowledge Base article 5303 dated 8/2/2005 says fast machines with dual CPUs may be the cause and they're investigating.

I find that FM Server is fine on a dual CPU Mac with Panther (2x1GHz G4), but I'm having trouble getting the WPE and Admin Console talking right.

Are you (Martin? or others) running FMServer Advanced -and- WPE on a dual-CPU machine without problems?

Any clues would be great -

[Martin Brändle]

I'm aware of this new KB article 5303 since one week. We had problems with the XSLT document() function leading to frequent "unexpected errors". We turned the second CPU on our dual-CPU Xserve off since now 6 days and don't have the problems anymore.

See the following thread:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/166497/

and the Apple documentation for turning off the second CPU:

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1141.html

[Søren Dyhr]

You can split up your databases on several servers, if you want to (and have the money).

Excuse my slight sidetracking of the subject, but have you found documentation on which applications might benefit from being set up in a Xgrid cluster, and if filemaker belongs to this cathegory???

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/xgrid.html

--sd

[Martin Brändle]

XGrid is for scientific computing software that can be parallelized and uses some form of message passing interface. FM does not belong to this class of software.

See http://developer.apple.com/hardware/hpc/xgrid_intro.html

(I had written parallelized scientific software with MPI years ago).