I'm converting a sizeable FM6 system to FM8 and am attempting to get best performance with respect to file references.

At the moment I am making all file references the same format as follows:

fmnet:/12.34.56.78/filename

fmnet:/*/filename

file:/filename

This is as optimised as I can think for a server which is at 12.34.56.78. The "*" option is superfluous, however it gives me the opportunity to switch ip addresses on the server without too much impact in a live system.

Originally I just had the "file" method, but there is a performance increase when you target the server using "fmnet"

Any one think of anything better?

I think the issue here is that you did not clean up redundant file references before you did the conversion.

The relative file:/filename reference should produce the best results.

Steven

Thanks Steven.

In fact I already spent many hours cleaning up redundant file references, but this does not clean them very well unfortunately. the "save relative path only" does not work, and has only appended the relative reference to the end of the existing references.

I understand the cleaning procedure, and I processed every relationship, script call and value list, but still I end up with multiple file references and some of the file references still exist for previous system architectures - including some that refer to an AppleTalk zone that no longer exists.

Obviously we only use TCP/IP now.

Some of the files originate from FMP 2.1 - maybe that's the problem?

The reason I opted for the IP address file reference is that there is a direct reference in an old FM document (Converting FileMaker Databases from Previous Versions) and when I did my own performance test there is a performance increase with IP address for the server.

If your files are all hosted from the same computer, then the relative path is what you should use. If the files are in different sub-folders, those folder names would have to be included in the path. I'd also suggest removing any spaces from the file names (using the Developer Utilities) and removing any spaces from the sub-folders.

As for consolidating file references before conversion, that would have had to be done using Metadata Magic's File Reference Fixer on the old version 6 files.

Thanks Ender.

I'm going to go with file:filename. I now believe there was NO performance difference as I posted earlier.

As it now only takes me 1 hour to correct the file refs then I'll not bother with the Metadata solution.