Hi,

Three remote offices connect to a hosted FM solution (larger than 50.000 records, many tables and files, separation model in place) using port 5003. The database is located in office 1. Office 2 is in the same country, different city, office 3 is in a different country. Both remote offices complain that the FM solution is slow when showing records and other operations (not even mention showing a report). They are using 4 Mb and 10 Mb symmetrical DSL lines. Locally the solution works fine. Besides FM, Internet connection in every office is also fine all time (no congestion or slow response).

The database does not contain fancy images, icons, container fields or similar. Just plain text data and standard FM graphic features used with moderation.

What bandwidth would you recommend?

Bandwidth apart:

Is this normal under this circumstances?

What other options besides optimizing the database further? (this has been tried before with no luck)

Thank you

You must also consider latency: this is the time lag. This is related to distance. I've read elsewhere that subjective database "responsiveness" is very sensitive to latency.

Consider using a remote desktop terminal service for the remote users.

You must also consider latency

Latency, uhmm. I will check.

Consider using a remote desktop terminal service for the remote users.

Would a remote desktop connection to a local machine work better than FM own port connection? It does not sound logical, but...

Does anyone got ANY terminal-server-solution to work well? I have tried AquaConnect to one of our customers but it does not work at all, server crashes, a lot of printer and screen-resolution issues and so on.... now we are talking about som kind of WAN-accelerator (to speed up latency)..... Our customer is now on FileMaker9 (server) and will shortly go to FM12 (server and clients)..... What version do you use Bluearrow?

Citrix and Terminal Services work flawlessly.  There is nothing equally optimized on the Mac side.

When you said 'slow' in showing records, exactly what are you showing ? List View or Form View ? Are there summary fields or un-stored calculation or are you trying to sort records ? All these have great impact on performance

 

I remotely access my HQ database with only 1 Mb DSL with 20,000+ records. It is a bit slow but acceptable. Just have to watch out what we put up in the layout and optimise script steps.  If we have lengthy report to run, we use server script to perform the report.