ODBC Hangs FM, sometimes crashes FM Server

[oilcan]

We've recently set up ODBC drivers (latest Actual drivers) on our FM Server machine (FM Server 10 Advanced, OS = OS X Server 10.5.8). We are currently trying to use it in a simple implementation, wherein we can import new records from our MySQL webserver directly into our FM production database. We're not using any relationships to any MySQL table occurrences, I just created the table occurrences for the external source to allow us access to the data in FM.

In my current method, I run a script that finds the highest id in our production database, then performs a find in the MySQL table for all ids greater than the highest that's been imported. It then runs an import of these found records into our main production table. (FM Pro 11 is the client, running from OS X 10.6).

This works fine sometimes. However, occasionally when it performs the find on the MySQL table, FileMaker hangs up. It must be force quit in order to get out of the hang. Worse yet, today when this happened it crashed our FM Server. This happened twice. I did not know the terminal commands for restarting the process so I was forced to remotely restart the server machine itself.

Needless to say, this is 100% completely unacceptable behavior. Our facility is not the only one using FM Server on this machine, so the act of using ODBC, which should be making our lives easier, is currently jeopardizing the work of two labs.

Does anybody know of anything that can be causing this problem? Any solutions?

[Jonathan Monroe]

For the hanging issue, I suggest you set the "Network Timeout" value in the Advanced Options panel of your DSN to a small value, such as 10 seconds. If FM leaves your MySQL connection open, it may eventually timeout by the MySQL server or some piece of network equipment, unbeknownst to the driver. The next time the driver attempts to connect on the closed connection, it will wait for 3x the timeout period. For the default setting, that will be up to 10 minutes. Setting it to 10 seconds will cause the "hang" to be no longer than 30 seconds.

For the crash, I'm not aware of any driver-related issue that might be causing that, as long as you are using a version of MySQL that is officially supported by FileMaker (i.e. MySQL 5 or later). The next time you see the crash, please send us the crash report along with the version of the driver you're using to [email protected].

Jonathan Monroe

Actual Technologies - ODBC for Mac OS X

www.actualtech.com

[oilcan]

For the hanging issue, I suggest you set the "Network Timeout" value in the Advanced Options panel of your DSN to a small value, such as 10 seconds. If FM leaves your MySQL connection open, it may eventually timeout by the MySQL server or some piece of network equipment, unbeknownst to the driver. The next time the driver attempts to connect on the closed connection, it will wait for 3x the timeout period. For the default setting, that will be up to 10 minutes. Setting it to 10 seconds will cause the "hang" to be no longer than 30 seconds.

For the crash, I'm not aware of any driver-related issue that might be causing that, as long as you are using a version of MySQL that is officially supported by FileMaker (i.e. MySQL 5 or later). The next time you see the crash, please send us the crash report along with the version of the driver you're using to [email protected].

Jonathan Monroe

Actual Technologies - ODBC for Mac OS X

www.actualtech.com

Thanks for the information. I have taken your advice and adjusted the time-out to 10 seconds. I've also had a chat with our MySQL admin about looking into changing the time-out rules for FileMaker. I will update this thread with any further information as I can.