I have a spare FMS 9 and some spare xServe and OSXs.

1. xServe G4/1.33 DP Cluster Node (Dual Core)

2. xServe G4/1.33 (Slot Load)

A. OSX 10.5.8 Server

B. OSX 10.5.8 Standard

Question: What would be the best combination of HW and OS to have best performance.

Greg

Edited October 17, 200916 yr by Guest

OS dosent really matter, for database servers you need fast HDD and lots of RAM

or you could try to use a RAID 1 and double your read speed, just an idea.

Would the 'Dual Core' on the Xserve G4/1.33 DP Cluster Node make any difference in speed?

of course faster processor is better and especially if you have many users connected at the same time, but faster HDD will give better performance compared to a faster cpu

OS does matter; use the Server OS instead of the workstation OS. Both these machines are pretty low end however. For some basic uses, they'll work.

Hard drive subsystem and processor speed together with RAM are keys. Most off the shelf xServers are not well suited as FileMaker Server machines. Fix the drives first with SCSI or SAS instead of the default SATA. Have 4 GB RAM installed.

And if you want best use of existing processors, upgrade to FileMaker Server 10.

Steven

"The server edition, Mac OS X Server, is architecturally identical to its desktop counterpart, and includes tools to facilitate management of workgroups of Mac OS X machines, and to provide access to network services. These tools include a mail transfer agent, a Samba server, an LDAP server, a domain name server, and others. It is pre-loaded on Apple's Xserve server hardware, but can be run on most of Apple's computer models."

i dont see how the server edition offers more performance. the server edition just adds more services

Installed FMS9 on OSX Server with 2GB and it works very well.

Really don't know if the xServer cluster node will take 4GB instead of 2GB.