Slow client use and sorting

[Gilgam3sh]

Hey, this is my first post on the forum and I just wanted to say that it has been a great source of information. Okay, down to the issue.

I inhereted a filemaker network from my boss and am still learning the fine points(and lets face it the basic concepts too) of this particular type of database. We're serving the database from a box running fmp 9.0 and the five license scheme.(I'd live to use fmp servers adavanced but thats a little ways off) The server has a 2.4 ghz quad core xeoon and four gigs of ram.

We have five live connections available, 3 of which we use locally and two we keep open for clients(literally clients, not in the sense that they are client computers) to access through the site we host using IWP.

Lately we've been experiencing some extremely slow sorting and pageing between individual files. Sometimes it essentially locks up the client computers fmp. This is not so much through the IWP but through our live connections. The client computers aren't great but it's never been an issue before for any of them, and now it is for all.

Any help? Please let me know.

[Colin Keefe]

Though using peer-to-peer certainly isn't helping with performance, I'd look first to the design of your database file.

Have you made any recent changes the to schema, like defining portals or relationships to sort on unindexed/unindexable fields?

[Gilgam3sh]

The only changes of substances were the addition of a field to a couple of pages(literally two) and one or two minor relational changes. We run the peer to peer because we are constantly updating and adding files(about 150 new files a month now). We will eventually be moving to file maker sever but for reasons both financial and technical, thats on the backburner.

[LaRetta]

...and adding files(about 150 new files a month now).

Could you explain a bit about this for us? :smile2:

[Gilgam3sh]

Sorry for being vague. Essentialy we have 150+ records being added a month. These occupy up to 225 fields fields across multiple databases. they display across several tables. I'm considering creating more tables each displaying less information, but I'm not sure if that will make things better or worse. I removed an indexed field(prettymuch the only major change since this became a problem) and that didn't help. thanks for all the quick responses.

[IdealData]

If you haven't done so yet then get all machines upgraded to latest FMP 9 (see www.filemaker.com).

Slow paging between files could be due to file definitions. I am presuming that because you have a multi-file system it came from a pre 7 build.

Did any of your machines, including the server, get an XP updates recently?

Try also increasing the available RAM to each FMP - particularly the server.

[Colin Keefe]

When you say sorts are slow, do you mean:

A. Hitting control/command-S and defining, then running a sort takes longer

or

B. paging from one record to the next pops up a sort dialog that takes a long time?

The first option would point to attempting to sort on unindexed fields.

The second would point to portals or relationships that are defined to sort, or calc fields on the layout that depend on relationships that are sorted, etc - and that the field it's attempting to sort on has somehow changed.

And if it's B you're experiencing, I would look to the fields you added to the layouts and see how they're defined. Share here and we'll help sort it out.

Um, no pun intended.