Hey Gang, A couple of questions if I may..

We have a group of around 14 DB's loading into Filemaker Server of which 2 are around the 20MB mark. (They are all linked). It regularly crashes. Is this because the DB's are too big, v5 doesn't run well on OSX Server or something i'm perhaps missing. Debugging has not been fruitful, sometimes it would appear to be a timeout idle problem other times not..

2nd.. when I stop the fmserverd I can not restart it. Error states that another instance is running. Even though ps -aux doesn't show it. I'm guessing it's a locked file or a temp file. If thats the case, where the heck is it?

TIA, Will

20 MB is not big for filemaker.I was read that there are databases which have 26000000 records.

FMS 5 can be rock-solid stable in MAcOS 9. FMS 5.5 can also be rock-solid in MAC OS X as long as it is patched to 5.5v4. FMS 5.5 is better and more stable on Mcc OS X... I'd be tempted to run FMS 5 in MacOS 9 (native, not classic mode) or earlier maybe 8.6 if you have a machine that will run it.

When running FMS in OS 8 or 9 make sure the FMS application is always to the front, the active aplication. Disable screensavers and make sure it's the only app running.

It sounds like you have a corrupted database. Run the Recover command over the file (or files) then import the data into *known-good clones* of the files. Do not put the recovered files back into production.

If you don't have any known-good copies then rebuild them from scratch. It's the only way of getting a stable system.

The only time I get unstable FMP 6 files is when they hit the 2GB limit.

Facets:

Welcome to the Forums.

I'd second Vaughan's suggestion that you've got a corrupted file in there somewhere. I had an awful time dealing with a client who had FMServer 5.5 on OSX, with crashes occuring around twice a week. I patched everything, and it all still occured. In the end, by copying their whole solution (designed originally by an intern) and running it for a couple of days at my studio, I discovered that there were three corrupted files in the solution, and that the corruptions only came to the surface during some seldom-used tasks. I rebuilt the three files from scratch, and now the system works fine.

On OSX, you should make sure the system is set to not sleep, the hard drives are set to not sleep, the IP address is manually set, and try to make your scheduled backups take place when there is little usage of the data files. Also, once you get it all fixed & running smoothly, make clones of your files and store them somewhere safe, so you can recover data to them if you run into a file corruption problem again.

-Stanley