Filemaker not using RAM for sorts

[Dirk H. Schulz]

Hi Folks,

I am evaluating Filemaker for a large email database. The problem is: on importing large amounts of emails (thousands) the client crashes.

I can prevent that by doing a sort on the database after every email. But a sort takes minutes.

Filemaker does the sorts on disk, although the Mac Pro has 32 GB of RAM (I can see that by the way disk activity happens).

Is it possible to pin a database in RAM like I can do it with tables in Oracle? Is it possible to force FMS9 to make sorts in RAM?

Our project clearly would fail with Filemaker being unable to use RAM efficiently.

Any help or hint would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Dirk

[Steven H. Blackwell]

I believe 8 GB RAM is the most that OS X can manage, unless there has been some change recently. As for FileMaker Server 9, provided you have at least 4 GB RAM installed, it can reserve up to 800 MB RAM for its cache.

Short of making some sort of RAM disk--probably not a good idea--the sorting occurs on the client.

As for the import crashing, try setting the client side cache to 12 MB, up from the default 8MB. Also maybe import the information in blocks with a flush cache step in between if the file [color:red]is not hosted by FileMaker Server.

Steven