In order to take the load from the clients, I would like to tell the server manually (button or external applescript) to run a script.

Is there any way to do that?

Thank you for your short thoughts

If the file is hosted in FM Server then create a server-side script -- though server scripts have some limitations. Otherwise set up a "robot" machine running FMP and have it run the script every so often.

it is hosted on a server machine, and i'm used to server-side scripts. but: i want to tell the server to run a script - at any given time, not at a scheduled time.

robot is unfortunately not a possible solution

You can manually run a script through the server admin console.

Otherwise, set up a field in a prefs table. Configure the server side script to fire every X minutes and check the field, but only do the processing if the field has the right value in it.

I set up an e-mail processing script for clients that runs on the server every 15 minutes. The script performs a find for unprocessed records: if it finds some it sends the messages, if it finds none it does nothing.

that's a nice idea!

does this check use much server power? would you think x = 2 minutes is to much?

Server power as in electricity? or as in cpu cycles? Either case I dunno. I'd rather not have the server popping off and running scripts every 2 minutes though (imagine if every file needed a script like this...)

Best to ask what length of wait would be unacceptable and start at once a day and work backwards.

With the client that I mentioned above, running the mail send script every 30 minutes turned out to have the bonus benefit of (usually) allowing time to un-send e-mails.