Upgrade to FM Sever 8?

[dgabriner]

Our office is currently running FM Sever 7, and has about 8 people running FMPro 8.5 or 8.5 advanced clients.

We are having performance issues when certain scripts are run, as well in day to day use. Will upgrading to FM Server 8 have any significant performance boosts?

A side issue, which maybe should be asked in a different section of the forums is what kind of machine is recommended for running the server? We have about 30 different databases, some small, some big, that all interact with each other. The application is in constant use throughout the day, and it manages our entire calendar system, client requests, and many other things.

We currently are using a PC, with an AMD Anthlon XP 2700+ processor, 1 gig of ram, and two mirrored 80 gig HDs.

[Ender]

We are having performance issues when certain scripts are run, as well in day to day use. Will upgrading to FM Server 8 have any significant performance boosts?

There are known issues with Finds on unstored calcs performing erroneously or very slowly with certain combinations of Server 8 and FM7 clients and Server 7 and FM8 clients. I don't recall if 8.5 clients have any such issues with Server 7. Perhaps you can tell us what is running slow?

In general, I think an upgrade of your FileMaker Server software would be a good thing. We found Server 8 to be more stable and a little faster than Server 7. You will want to make sure to use the latest updater (8v3?) and make sure all your clients are updated to the latest rev for their versions.

[dgabriner]

That is very helpful. Thanks a lot. Any ideas on whether running on a PC or Mac would be faster? What type of processor? How much RAM? or what type of HD setup to use?

[Ender]

I can't advise about PC specs, except that it's best to stick with server class hardware and make sure that the specific OS is supported. Of course, the network and hard drives are the biggest bottlenecks, so it's good to try to bump up the speeds of those as much as possible.

The optimal configuration depends on the number of concurrent users you expect to have, the complexity of the finds and reports, and how often such operations are being done. Also, if you plan on doing any web publishing, this may require a system that's a little more robust.

[xochi]

I'll chime in here to say that, at least for the kind of stuff I'm doing, RAM is very important -- FM7 and 8, as compared to 6, can use much larger RAM caches on both server and client. Since RAM is faster than DISK, which is faster than NETWORK, you want to help FM use RAM whenever possible.

[dgabriner]

What do you mean by help FM use RAM? Our system currently has 1 GB of RAM, but according to someone here, is only "using" half of that. Our network is extremely fast, so I doubt that is a bottleneck, and we have 2 mirrored 80 gig HDs. The processor is AMD Athlon XP 2700+, could this be a bottleneck? Would adding 2 GB help if we are only currently "using" half a gig?

Also, we currently have about 10 clients at any given time on the system.

Thanks again.

Edited October 9, 2006 by Guest

[Ender]

Our network is extremely fast, so I doubt that is a bottleneck

That's good. Sometimes people are surprised that things run slower on a DSL connection than on the local network.

we have 2 mirrored 80 gig HDs.

The size of the drives is not really important. It's the drive type (IDE, SCSI, Serial ATA, Firewire), drive speed, and access speed where there's differences to be aware of. And Mirroring by itself does not improve performance. 'Striping' is for performance, 'Mirroring' is for redundancy. A 'RAID' can be a combination of both on two or more drives.

Also, we currently have about 10 clients at any given time on the system.

That's really not a very big load. I've typically got 130 concurrent connections, with no lags when reports are run.

You still haven't said what script processes are running slow, so it's still possible there's something with the way your scripts are designed that's part of the problem.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

On the topic of server hardware specifications:

Pentium 4 or Xeon or the equivalent on Macintosh.

Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition (not other versions) or Macintosh OS X Server. OS X can be used in some instances for smaller systems.

Dual processor not required but can be helpful on Windows OS.

2 GB RAM minimum, more if you're using IWP.

UW-SCSI drives (10K rpm minimum),

High quality NIC card.

Set the amount of RAM reserved for cache as high as it will go and the flush interval for 1 minute, ubless you have unusually large files.

Be sure you have redundant emergency power, surge protection, etc.

[angelleye]

Do you happen to have any external applications hitting your FM Server via ODBC or Custom Web Publishing? If so, see this thread:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/180924/tp/3/