FM8 and WAN Speed

[Jalz]

Just curious, I had a fairly large solution programmed in FMPv6, and tested it over the WAN a couple of years ago and found it to be dreadfully slow.

The server was using a DSL 512k upload connection and I was testing it at home with a 1MB download connection.

For me the major amount of time was taken by the opening of the related files and switching layouts in different files.With the new 7/8 feature where you can design a FileMaker based system in one file with many TO's, I presume has made loading FM based systems on WAN quicker which = usable?

Has anyone created a solution that they would like to share some of the design ins and out and best/optimal system requirements. Better still, i'd love to actually use an FM8 db via the WAN so I can judge the performance for myself, although realistically that would be a long shot(FM should have a sample template online)......just thinking about this route again for one of my clients as the other was publishing it to the web, IWP doesn't support "preview" mode -(.

[Fenton]

I've logged into FileMaker 7 files over WAN, and it is many times faster than 6. I don't know about 8 yet; I hope it will be faster. Though there are always some things that are a lot faster, and a few things that may be slower.

As far as design, simpler is better (duh). Also, global fields are treated differently in 7/8 networks, causing more traffic, so should be used sparingly; there are other methods to pass data.

Generally, for all versions of FileMaker, complex calculations with unstored fields, especially calculations manipulating ValueListItems(), used as a relationship key are kind of slow over LAN, even more so over WAN. There are custom functions which can do the same kind of Sum(text) operation which are faster.

I don't know which is actually "faster", WAN or IWP; but WAN is so much less annoying and so much more powerful that I would always prefer it (if they have FileMaker, otherwise it's a moot point).

[Jalz]

Hi Fenton,

Thanks for the response. I tried hosting a migrated application this morning, and I was pretty amazed at the speed...comparing it to FMP6.

One other thing for good WAN design is to limit the use of graphics. The other is to design the system in one table, as external files did take a while to pop up-but i was testing on a 56K connection....cant wat to get home to see what speed is like on a dsl connection