best set up for FMSA on 2 machines?

[Reed]

Hi,

I am currently running FMSA 8v4 on one machine with OS X 10.4.8 on a Dual 1.8 GHz G5 with 2GB of RAM, but I am going to be adding some other services to my lab and will be adding a second machine to do some file serving, and running an Open Directory server for win and mac clients as well as for authenticating FM accounts in some databases.

I'm looking for advice on the best way to distribute services across these two machines. I know that I should not use the database server for file serving, so those will be kept separate, but I'm wondering how to best balance the load on the two machines without lengthy trial and error testing.

The "new" machine is a Dual Core 2GHz G5 with 3GB of RAM and my first thought is to divide things up this way:

FMS 8v4 all by itself on the dual 1.8 with OS 10.4

WPE and Apache along with Open Directory and file server on the faster dual 2GHz machine after installing 10.4 server.

I usually only have about 10 concurrent connections via FMP and a maybe half that number of IWP connections. The file/directory server will have about 10 concurrent connections as well.

Does anyone see any problems with this setup? Any suggestions for improvement that don't involve buying 4 Xserves and an Xserve RAID?

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Seems reasonable unless you expect heavy uploads/downloads from the file server of large files, e.g. 20MB graphics.

Keep that database server segregated though.

Also you may have to tinker with getting the WPE and the WPE talking correctly with the database server.

Steven

[John May - Point In Space]

I'd put the WPE on the FMSA box, not the Apache box. I know FileMaker recommends Apache/WPE separate from FMS on a 2 box setup, but I'm not sure I agree with that when you have other processes running on the Apache box as well.

Based on your FMS + WPE usage, this should not be a problem to do at all.

- John

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Fair enough, but I'd up the RAM to 4 GB if I did that.

FYI, FMI estimates that about 4% of installs use the 2 machine configuration.

Steven

[John May - Point In Space]

On a Windows server, maybe, but we have not seen it necessary to go over 2GB in our experiences here with OS X.

What are the other configuration percentages? Mostly 1 machine setups?

It is best to only have one process per processor/core in general (at least in the UNIX world). FMSA is 3 processes - web server, WPE and FMS. That said, it is definitely advantageous to split into 2 machines when dealing with dual processor/core systems.

- John

[Steven H. Blackwell]

95%----single machine

4%---two machines, either configuration

1%----three separate machines

0.5%---four machines (but that's secret)

Either platform i have found that if more than about 35 to 40 IWP guests are on simultaneously that things work much better with 4 GB RAM than with 2GB, what with the processes and the OS overhead. YMMV.

Steven

[John May - Point In Space]

Is your recommendation based on a single-machine configuration? We never see FMSA using over 2GB ram on our OS X servers here, but then we don't run single-machine configs.

What would someone need a 4th machine for?

- John

[Reed]

Thanks for all the good advice. Now I'm also thinking about what kind of storage to setup on each machine. Right now the FMSA box is just using one of the internal SATA drives to boot and the DB files are on the other disk. Timestamped backups are sent to an external FW drive and to two different network file servers every hour.

With this frequency of backups, would you think it unwise to place the live DB files on a software RAID 0? You obviously are less fault tolerant, but losing an hour of data isn't a huge deal to me with my setup. (Only ~$250 in transactions max) I'm looking at that G5 Jive unit from Sonnet to get a couple more internal drives into the one G5....

Another option I'm looking at (for the file server) is to get an external FW800 RAID setup that runs a RAID 1+0 setup on four drives.

[longterm_solutions]

Respectfully speaking, I can't say that I agree with that plan.

In my experience, FMSA should be alone on a machine, with nothing else taking up processor usage. In addition, the big bottleneck with using PHP and FileMaker is in the translation from PHP to XML, which happens in the Web Publishing Engine.

So it would follow that the WPE needs to be running on a machine other than the FMSA machine. We recently upgraded servers here at our company, and after a conversation with a tech at FMI, decided to put our newest machine to work as a web server, with an almost-as-fast machine running FMSA. WPE is installed on the web server; we also loaded the web server with tons of RAM to accommodate lots of traffic, and it's working out great so far.

However, it all depends on the amount of traffic; our servers get worked pretty hard, so we're always looking for ways to speed things up.

Best regards,

Bob Patin

Longterm Solutions

FileMaker 5/6/7/8 hosting

[email protected]

615-333-6858

http://www.longtermsolutions.com

CONTACT US VIA INSTANT MESSAGING:

AIM or iChat: longterm1954

Yahoo: longterm_solutions

MSN: [email protected]

ICQ: 159333060

[John May - Point In Space]

Actually, the translation from PHP to XML queries is done by PHP on the web server, not by the Web Publishing Engine.

The flow of operations is:

1 - Web request is made

2 - PHP on the web server evaluates the PHP code in the requested file

3 - The FileMaker API for PHP library commands cause XML queries for data to be made to the WPE

4 - The WPE queries FMS for the requested data, then formats it into the requested XML format and returns it to PHP on the web server

5 - PHP on the web server does any further processing of the data by the remaining PHP code on the page

6 - The formatted HTML is returned to the client

So, that all said, each of the processes in this equation rely primarily on the following:

- Web Server: Disk speed for file access, processor time dependent on complexity of PHP code

- WPE: Processor time for formatting of returned data from FMS into XML

- FMS: Disk speed for database access

Sooo... That said, if you're just running PHP on the web server, and your PHP code isn't that complex, then it would make sense to put the WPE on the web server.

However, if your PHP code is complex, if you are running any other middleware (such as Lasso), or if you are running other processes on the web server (as in the original poster's case), I would stand by my recommendation to place the WPE on the FMS machine instead. Since the WPE is primarily processor intensive and FMS disk intensive, they do play nice together in our observations (at least on OS X) - even in high traffic situations (we have a lot of those .

- John

[longterm_solutions]

John, I stand corrected!

I didn't realize that the PHP API (or FX.PHP, I assume they both do this the same then, right?) actually does the interpolation between XML and PHP. I'd assumed that WPE did this...

However, when I spoke to a tech at FMI, he asserted that best practice was to separate WPE from the FMSA machine when possible, which is why we've always run WPE on the web server here.

My particular dilemma was this: we were buying a new server, and had the choice of putting it to use either as a new web server or as a new FMSA machine. I decided to implement it as the web server, since it seemed to me (and the tech at FMI, whose name I now forget) that it would be more beneficial there.

My other question to him was whether I'd see any improvement in performance between, for example, a 2.0Ghz dual-core Intel Mac and an 8-core Intel Mac as a FileMaker server. His opinion was that I wouldn't see much difference at all, since FileMaker really didn't make use of all the power that an 8-core Mac has to offer. What's your take on it? It seems that I get varying opinions on this, and I'm still planning to upgrade our FMSA machine fairly soon.

Thanks for setting me straight on the "chain of command" in a PHP environment with FileMaker; all the best,

Bob Patin

Longterm Solutions

[email protected]

615-333-6858

http://www.longtermsolutions.com

CONTACT US VIA INSTANT MESSAGING:

AIM or iChat: longterm1954

Yahoo: longterm_solutions

MSN: [email protected]

ICQ: 159333060

[John May - Point In Space]

FMI's best practice recommendation is generalized for most situations. My recommendations are based on our real-world experience here observing high-load environments with added variables.

Since you added such a high powered box for your web server, it probably does make sense to have put the WPE on that machine.

I would not think an over-2-core machine would have much benefit for FMSA as FileMaker states as well.

- John

[longterm_solutions]

John, now that I have your attention, here's a question that you can probably answer:

During the process of migrating from the old web server to the new one, I'd love to be able to connect to FMSA from both web servers, so that I can move sites gradually while doing some testing along the way.

I haven't been able to find any documentation that states whether it's possible to connect 2 WP engines to one FMSA install; is this possible? Is it possible to have 2 web servers, each with their own install of WPE, both connected to the same FMSA machine?

Thanks,

Bob Patin

Longterm Solutions

[email protected]

615-333-6858

http://www.longtermsolutions.com

CONTACT US VIA INSTANT MESSAGING:

AIM or iChat: longterm1954

Yahoo: longterm_solutions

MSN: [email protected]

ICQ: 159333060

[John May - Point In Space]

It is possible, however not so easy to describe how we do it here. We have each of our web servers set up to be able to speak with any of our FMSA boxes based on settings in the client's directive.

For your situation, I think you can just install the admin console on both web servers and configure each accordingly.

- John

[longterm_solutions]

So you have more than one web server pointing to the same install of FMSA? When I go into FMSA Admin, I don't see a way to add a 2nd username/password for a 2nd install of WPE. That's what has me stumped...

Bob Patin

Longterm Solutions

[email protected]

615-333-6858

http://www.longtermsolutions.com

CONTACT US VIA INSTANT MESSAGING:

AIM or iChat: longterm1954

Yahoo: longterm_solutions

MSN: [email protected]

ICQ: 159333060

[John May - Point In Space]

You would just use the same username/password with the second web server's configuration.

- John