"Normal" values for usage statistics

[Jacob22x]

We are having some slowdown in our solution and I'm trying to use the log of usage statistics to narrow down the problem. However, I have no idea if the numbers are high or not. The FileMaker documentation will say "If the number is high, then..." but I have no idea if the number is high or not. One thing that seems weird to me is that I've got it reporting over a 100 remote calls/second. Can anyone give me insight into what they would consider "normal" ranges for these numbers?

[Wim Decorte]

There really is no telling because it is very solution specific and also network/hardware deployment specific to some extent.

Your best bet is to compare those numbers to the stats from when things were not slow (your baseline) because then you can see what numbers have increased.

[Jacob22x]

I found a great article that outlines "normal" numbers. I thought I'd include it here in case anyone else is interested. The link is http://www.briandunning.com/browse/browse0110.shtml

There's good information here over and above the advice on server statistics. But, in case that article goes offline, I'll include his advice on the statistics.

Cache Hit % This should be 100. If it's not, all you can do is turn up Configuration > Database Server > Database Cache to 800 MB (the max). There's no benefit in ever having it any lower.

Cache Unsaved % This should be 0. No worries if it's less than 5. Cache setting above is all you can do.

Disk KB/sec Doesn't matter as much as the I/O time below.

Elapsed Time/call Less than 100 is really good, less than 1000 means you probably don't have a problem. Really big numbers, like in the millions, mean that clients are having to wait a long time for server processes that aren't their fault. If this is the case, you probably have to fix some slow scripts, or maybe you have corruption.

I/O Time/call If this averages more than about 100, you should have faster hard drives on your FileMaker Server. I like to see a striped RAID array of 15,000 RPM disks. Hard disk speed is the ONLY really important specification for a FileMaker Server machine, more important than RAM or processor.

Network KB/sec If this averages more than 1000, you should probably see if you can reduce the amount of data going between FileMaker Server and the clients. Think of container fields and stuff like that. Whenever possible use layouts that don't include them. If you can't avoid it, go to gigabit ethernet, but remember it's of no benefit if your switches and network cards don't support it.

Remote Calls/sec I've never found this to be very important.

Wait Time/call Same comments as for Elapsed Time.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Some of these recommendations in the quoted article are dubious.

Steven