Speed: AppleTalk or TCP/IP

[falkaholic]

I have a system I made of about 13 or so databases that all all open at a time (most hidden of course)

Its hosted on FM server 5.5 on a Mac, all the clients are Mac. I was wonder which protocol is faster for a LAN; TCP or AppleTalk?

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Use TCP. FileMAker Pro 5 and 5.5 and the respective server versions are designed to run on it.

HTH

Old Advance Man

[falkaholic]

thanks

[RussBaker]

Sort of related to your speed question and for general information...

BTW, concur with TCP/IP as the way to go. Appletalk has lots of extraneous data which tends to slow database comms down a bit.

For one of the major Australian Mountain Bike races last year we used Airport to network 2 iBooks, 2 iMacs and a printer. The iBooks were chugging away administering the race and calculating lap times while the iMacs were available for spectators to check team placings etc.

Airport worked fine but it was slow. When signal strength got down to about 3 dots, the real network speed was about 3 mbs.

Airport works on a radio freq of ~2GHz (same as weather radars?) so when it started to rain, the signal got even weaker and I eventually had to turn off the spectator iMacs which were in a different tent 30 metres away because the network speed just wasn't up to it.

Russ Baker

[nightdesigns]

quote:

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Originally posted by Russell Baker:

Airport works on a radio freq of ~2GHz (same as weather radars?) so when it started to rain, the signal got even weaker and I eventually had to turn off the spectator iMacs which were in a different tent 30 metres away because the network speed just wasn't up to it.

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A lot of things run at 2Ghz like you're wireless telephone and cell phones. I think the signal loss was due more to people blocking the signals. Try this, watch the signal strength as your move your hand over and around the transmitter/reciever. That's just one hand. Put 20-30 people moving, and it's a nightmare. A better option would have been to get the transmitters/recievers above the height of the people with extensions or use low power microwave (or to even bury an ethernet cable the 100m.)

-j

[Garry Claridge]

Another thought!

A browser/cdml solution would run much faster in that situation. You could also restrict the users and present limited data.

All the best.

Garry

[RussBaker]

Garry,

The iBooks and iMacs had airport cards in them. We had a single Airport Hub which was within a couple of metres of the iBooks. The hub was also ethernetted to a printer.

I contolled spectator access to the data - via the iMacs only - by password/group and also by taking the keyboards away so they only had mouse and button clicks to use.

The Race was the Australian 24 Hour Mountain Bike Race - in case you're interested.

Russ

[RussBaker]

-j,

We had the Airport Hub and the iMacs up above head height but I'm still pretty confident it was the rain. During the day, when there were thousands of people (with mobile phones?) around the race site it worked OK but about 0200 in the morning with only a few hardy spectators watching, when it was bucketing down is when it went slooooow.

This year, we're going to use ethernet - for a start its 100mbs which is heaps better than even the manufacturer's claim for AirPort. Last year, one of the race sponsors wanted to demo the AirPort. It certainly worked from the convenience point of view, but speed matters.

Russ

[Garry Claridge]

Russ,

Did you have Airport cards in each of the iMacs or did you use two Airports as a bridge?

Thanks.

Garry