Frequent Connectivity Issues

[bdam]

First off, we're using a Windows Server 2003 machine running FM Server with the max cache and default write cache to disk time. My client's cache settins are the default as well, currently 7Mb of cache flushed when idle.

Some times our network simply has a bad day. They are infrequent enough, short enough, and hit-n-miss enough that I'm not sure what I can do about it or if it's worth it. Most of the time I never even notice for FileMaker. It seems that with 8.5 even the slightest blip seems to send up the connectivity warning and a database shutdown. Of course this means that I lose everything I've entered. I have some records that are pretty data entry intensive so entering a new record can take 4 or 5 minutes. When our network (and thus FM) is having a bad day it can get to the point where I can't enter one of these.

While I'll be the first to blame the network, is there a way to get FM to come to terms with a slightly flaky connection? We've been using FM for almost a decade and only with the new version has this problem come to the forefront like this.

Thanks,

Bryan

[Keith LaMarre]

You didn't mention if the W2k3 server is also running other services - what is the load on the network/server machine?

[bdam]

Excellent question Keith. It is running XWall which is a Spam filter. We've kept a pretty good eye on the the network, cpu, ram utilization because I was initially pretty scared about how this thing would perform. We haven't seen anything out of the ordinary.

[Keith LaMarre]

All I can say from my experience is that FileMaker Server is generally a pretty stable network environment - assuming that the machine and network are up to spec, its surprising that it should take so much time to create a record? I have seen that kind of thing actually in older versions of the program when the file references would look all over the place for related files but not with 7 or 8. I have only FM Server 7 Advanced running but have 10-15 users hitting it full time and 5-10 of these are connected via Citrix and Terminal Services and don't have this kind of trouble. I am sure that there are some hardware/network guys in this forum who might be able to give you more info.

[bdam]

Just got some reporting back on the server, it occasionally spikes up to a little over 50% nothing on the CPU sides seems awry.

I’m fairly sure that the problem lies in our local network. Maybe I should have included a bit more detail about our network. The server is at another location where all our servers are. Between them and us is two T1s bonded together. From there it splits through about 8 different switches which comprise our local network.

What I was hoping for was some sort of way to manage FileMaker’s time out functionality. If it loses communication you loose everything you’ve worked on since the last commit. I ‘thought’ FM committed data every time you exited a field but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I should also mention that when I mentioned the time it took to create the record I meant man-time not machine time. There’s just a crazy amount of fields to enter in each record so it takes a few minutes to do data entry for each record. If we’re having a bad day they get part way through and lose it all.