FM takes a long time to boot up

[JohanneS]

Hi,

can anyone tell me why FM Pro takes such a long time to boot up?

I checked out the performance monitor: after FM has taken some processor cycles nothing happens for about 10 to 15 seconds.

It seems that FM is scanning the network for any other running instances.

Is that right?

Has anyone encoutered a similar problem? Does anyone have any solutions?

Thanks,

JohanneS

[FUBAR]

I know that FM 5 scans the network at program bootup to make sure that its the only one running on the network with the same liscense number. This might be the entire reason for the slow down but I don't know much about it so there could be other factors.

As for speeding it up, your guess is as good as mine. I find that the bootup takes about the same amount of time whether the computer is connected to a network or not, but then again I'm running on a very old, very slow computer

Hope this helps.

[Kurt Knippel]

Do you have many Filemaker hosts on the network? What network settings are you using? What OS version?

[JohanneS]

We are a small company with a maximum of 5 FM applications running simultaneously on the network. All of our machines are NT or Win2k Professional boxes, with processor speed ranging from 400 to 1700 MHz. And I don't make use of the network at all, as I'm developing a standalone solution.

What makes me feel very *unhappy* is the fact that even a runtime version of my FM application doesn't behave (much) better. I always thought that such a solution can be passed on royality-free, without the need of installing FM on the client's side??

- JohanneS

[Kurt Knippel]

It is possible that you can make use of the Hosts file to specify the IP#s of the existing Filemaker hosts on the network. This might speed your startup.

A long bootup is NOT normal and is usually indiciative of another problem.

[Anatoli]

On my 1GHz PIII the second FM 5 start is 5 seconds. I would not call that slow.

[JohanneS]

I'm not familiar with the concept of the Hosts file. May this file play a major role even in a situation where I make use of a runtime solution? Hmmm...

Is it possible that FM gets into trouble with fragmented files? It seems as if my runtime solution gets a little bit slower each time I launch it - although the number of records doesn't change (there is a predefined constant number of records for each day of the year).

But that wouldn't explain why FM Pro itself takes such a long time to boot up...!?

- JohanneS

[LeCates]

JohanneS,

If you are on a Windows machine, you might try cleaning out your Windows temp directory.

Good luck!

[JohanneS]

Lucky strike!

Cleaning up the Temp folder speeds up of the bootup process enormously!!

Is this a flaw of the FM implementation? I know a lot of applications which make use of the Temp folder but none of them has ever caused such annoying performance problems...!?!

And is there any solution to this? Apart from urging our customers to clean up the folder periodically?

Thanks,

JohanneS

[LeCates]

Hi JohanneS,

I don't know if I'd call it a flaw of FileMaker, or of Windows, or perhaps the other apps that leave behind all their "temporary" files permanently, but definitely I would recommend cleaning out the temp directories periodically. FileMaker uses temp files and will benefit from speedy access to those directories.

[john white ifc]

quote:

---

Originally posted by droid:

JohanneS,

If you are on a Windows machine, you might try cleaning out your Windows temp directory.

---

Does this apply to NT boxes as well?

I've got a client with an absurdly slow boot-up of their FileMaker Server v3 application (see my topic "Reply to: Server 5.x speed+stability (and really big files!)")

I'd like to suggest the TEMP-directory clean-out without looking like too much of a Mac wienie (which I am).

[NHuser]

Can anyone tell me how to clean up my Windows temp directory files? (I use 98SE)

I regularly clean out my temporaty internet files, but how do I clean out the temp directory files that may speed up Filemaker's boot up? (Filemaker takes 25 seconds to boot up on my PIII Dell)

Thanks,

NHuser

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Usually it's c:windowstemp

[NHuser]

can you safely just delete all those files and folders in c:windowstemp?

NHuser

[Anatoli]

quote:

---

Originally posted by NHuser:

Can anyone tell me how to clean up my Windows temp directory files? (I use 98SE)

I regularly clean out my temporaty internet files, but how do I clean out the temp directory files that may speed up Filemaker's boot up? (Filemaker takes 25 seconds to boot up on my PIII Dell)

Thanks,

NHuser

---

On some DELL (and others as well) is conflict between audio card and FM. That is cured by v. 5.5.2.

Try to disable the internal audio.

[NHuser]

Dear anatoli,

Thanks for your input. In this case though, I don't think it's the sound card because I've been successfully using FM 5.0 for 18 months on this same computer and only recently had the crash problems. I recovered, cloned, and imported records into new databases now, and hopefully I'll be OK.

But, one thing I really want to do is clean out my Windows TEMP folder, there are alot of files in there. Does anybody know how to do this? Is it safe to just delete all the folders and files in the c:windowstemp folder?

Thanks alot for your help,

NHuser

[LeCates]

Hi NHuser,

You can generally clean out (delete) files in your /temp directories safely. That's why they're in the /temp directory and not somewhere else.

However, it is possible that some currently active applications or services may have active files in the temp directory - deleting these may affect current performance.

As such, I'd recommend first quitting all applications. Then sort the temp directory by date, and delete all files that are older than the current date.

Good luck,

[NHuser]

Thanks Andrew,

I appreciate your help. I quit all applications and deleted everything in the CWindowsTemp folder per your recommendation and it reduced my Filemaker bootup time from 25 to 10 seconds. I would have thought that Windows Disk Cleanup or Norton Utilities (which I regularly use both) would have cleaned up this folder but I guess not. I wonder what else can be done to improve performance

Thanks alot.

NHuser

[Anatoli]

NHuser,

I do suspect something going fishy on your network. You shouldn't get corruption and slowdowns without reason. Maybe card, cable, hub or switch, it is difficult to say.