I just spent the last 6 weeks slaving away on my first major fmp application. All the development was done on my own machine locally. My company has a G3 machine several states away that they want to serve this database from. The database does everything at light speed when run locally but when we put it up on the server it ran so slowly that its practically unusable. I knew we'd take a performance hit when we put it on the server but this is rediculous. It takes as much as 100-200 times longer to perform the same operations.

Specs: FMP 4.1, server is a G3 running on a T1 line. Remote test stations are Compaq Presarios 56MB ram, 500 mhz, Windows 98(same machine that system was developed on) using Roadrunner as our ISP. The server is hosting 3 low traffic websites and demonstrates no significant performance issues with regards to these sites. One of these websites accesses the database in question via Lasso and there do not appear to be any performance issues with regards to this website - only with trying to use the database directly do we have these huge performance problems.

The worst response times are when something either has to get sorted or a portal has to display information or be scrolled. Finds are sometimes very slow also but not always.

A little background on the database itself:

The database consists of only one file which stores several different types of records. Each record type is accessed through its own layout and each layout has a portal relating to another record type in the file. The database currently contains about 700 records of various types and, like I said before, hauls ass when running locally with this same set of records.

What to do? Even our "network" guy is miffed.

Make sure that FMP Server is running in the forground (not Finder).

Strike that. I see you're not running FMP Server.

If you are connecting to FMP as a client via TCP/IP you are going to experience slower performance. This is due to the fact that FMP is designed to have the client machine do the work (sorts/finds/etc.), so it just transferes the data and the processing is done on the client side.

When the database is accessed via the web companion, FMP does the work on the server side and returns the results in the form of an HTML document.

[This message has been edited by dspires (edited December 08, 2000).]

Ok, first remember that T1 is approximately 100x SLOWER than your typical network, in term of raw data transfer, and scads slower than when running off your own harddrive. Do not ever expect performance even remotely close in this kind of environment.

Secondly you are "serving" with a normal copy of Filemaker Pro. This is NOT what it was designed for. It is designed as a client that can, in a pinch, serve to small workgroups. Get FMP Server up and running on a machine in your remote location.

Lastly, depending upon the number of users and the exact nature and purpose of the database, you may want to condsider other method of connection, such as Timbuktu, Citrix or via your web browser.

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Kurt Knippel

Consultant

Database Resources

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.database-resources.com

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