FMSA10 and xDBC access [ddfmsoc]

Hello everyone,

this is my first post here, so first of all good morning to all forum users and thanks for your time and help. Also, please forgive my bad English, it's not my first language

We are trying to go online with a new web system based on an FM database. It is a WebObjects solution that talks with FileMaker via its SequelLink JDBC drivers.

Performances have always been a problem, since the supported subset of SQL commands is not responding as expected (at least, that is what our web developers say), data type matching is a big issue and response time can get awfully high with a somewhat heavy load (if 100 users in the system can be considered a heavy load).

We have already moved some tables to a separate MySQL DB (and, believe me, the response time on those tables is almost 30x faster!), but in some situations the whole FMS system still gets extremely slow when JDBC queries rely on FM data.

Our production deployment is an FMSA9 running on an Intel Xeon 2.33 Quad Core Xserve with 8GB of RAM, RAID1 SATA drives and MacOSX Tiger Server 10.4.11. All software is up to date with latest updates.

I am testing the new FMSA10 in the hope of some improvement, and I found out that, at least on OSX, there is something new even if mostly undocumented.

In my test FMSA10 deployment a new system process, ddfmsoc, is now managing the JDBC and ODBC connections and queries on behalf of fmserverd.

The best I could find about this is three lines in the FM10 xDBC guide, telling that a SequeLink Server 5.5 process is in charge of managing these requests, and to check its load if something gets stuck with xDBC queries.

I'd like to know if someone has some additional info on this matter, especially if there are some settings that can be changed to improve overall xDBC performances. I can only see that this new process is multithreaded.

In this new test deployment, the CPU load has almost totally moved from fmserverd to ddfmsoc, but the final result is almost the same.

Any help will be much appreciated.

Many thanks

Mat