I'm looking into using CWP for event registrations, but it must stand up to several hundred hits in an hour. Can anyone advise?

Our email invitations go out to several hundred people simultaneously, and many respond quickly. Till now, we used a MySQL database online and downloaded the data into our office FileMaker DB after all the registrations had come in.

I'm the FileMaker guy; another team did the web side and I know little about it.

Now, we wonder if it makes more sense to have registrants interact directly with a FileMaker DB using CWP. We would use a commercial service to host the FileMaker DB. Because our clients are demanding, we can't risk subjecting registrants to long delays, and it's also important that they not be aware they are interacting with FileMaker. I am assuming that Custom Web Publishing will allow us to serve pages that don't bear any telltale FileMaker graphics.

So, is this worth pursuing?

Thanks for any helpful suggestions.

I just checked our log files for our two virtual hosts that are served by FMS7A CWP (XML/XSLT Web Publishing, no PHP) for one week (17/Nov/2005 01:00 - 24/Nov/2005 01:00) for the strings "xsl" and "xml". In this time, we got a total of 49959 GET or POST requests to the WPE, so in average 297 GET or POST requests per hour.

Note however, that the most of the activity is during work hours, so you can double this number to about 600 GET or POST requests per work hour.

It depends on how you design your dynamic web pages so that the user gets the impression that the system is responsive. The generation of the XML result tree by the web publishing core is not very fast, IMHO; the XSLT transformation is faster. Maybe it gets better with FMS8A. Therefore it is best to provide a maximum of 100 records per page to get reasonable answer times of less than 5 seconds, or to load and transform data in little chunks by way of XSLT document(), if the document structure is more complicated (e.g. to replace portals). In one of our pages, XSLT document() may be called up to 70 times. The complete page loads in 20-30 seconds, but the first records are already there after a 2-3 seconds. This is an indication that 3-4 requests/second can be handled by the WPE.

I have just used an event registration system working with both MySQL and FM.

The MySQL database is on the hosted web-site and the FM database is in-house. The FM database uses AppleScript to check for additional entries to the MySQL database then it downloads them and imports the file.

The web-site uses some PHP to select the additional registrations and update a log with the date and time of the download.

All the best.

Garry