mac Advice needed on server hardware (MAC)

[stefansmith]

Hi,

 

I am hoping some kind individual may impart some advice on what hardware I should be considering for the following.

 

The short version is this:

 

I am in the process of building a FM solution (extensively to run under Go) for the industry I work in.  It is an "OFFLINE" solution to be marketed by one of the leading suppliers in the industry in which I work.

 

What I am constructing is something I have already done and have used in a live situation for 18 months with other companies.  This solution is more generic and focused on our industry as a whole, rather than our particular working practices.

 

The Server is best thought of like an "email server"......it is merely there to allow the transportation of data from iPad to iPad within each company using the software and service.

 

There is ONE table only on the server side database, containing around 14 text fields.  The synchronisation and data replication is handled by storing the tables and records in these text fields and reassembling as necessary on the device.  We have 18 months of doing this on large data sets and it works very well.  To emphasise - the server is doing nothing more than temporarily holding data until other devices connect and retrieve it!  It does not process any data whatsoever.

 

In essence, an UPLOAD consists of writing records; the DOWNLOAD is downloading to the device.  

 

I am using the data separation model for this approach so there is one dedicated interface file that opens the connection to the server and as soon as the upload/download is complete, the database closes and connection is terminated.

 

The experience we have is for a mid-sized company....there will be potentially many users with far less data and some with larger data sets.  Based on experience, most connections to the server during our "sync" process last between 15 and 20 seconds.

 

The longest connection time we have seen for a large data set was just under 60 seconds.

 

This data has been collected over 30,000 transactions.

 

Potentially, once the solution is released and marketed, the number of users could reach 1000 or more.  Deployment would be across several servers as the number of users grow.

 

IF a server were to handle groups of 250 users what would be required?  I am looking at MAC ONLY HARDWARE, not Windows.  If we reached 250 users we would deploy a second server and so on. 

 

Clearly, 250 users are not going to connect all at once although in "theory" they could....the database on the server is about as minimal as you can get......literally just 14 text fields per record.  No calculations and 1 plain vanilla layout.

 

Can anyone recommend a suitable hardware configuration?

 

The 18 months of experience we have shows a sync process is requested on average twice a day.....with most connections lasting no more than 20 seconds.....and we have yet to see one peak past 60 seconds.

 

Any advice would be gratefully received !

 

Thanks in advance, 

 

 

Stefan

 

 

[Wim Decorte]

The simple recommendation is to get the best hardware you can get for the budget you have in mind.

 

The more complex recommendation is:

You go to great lengths to say that FMS does nothing with the data.  But it is still a database server, it will still run backups, keep cache, update records, send and receive records and notify users of changes.  So there is really nothing THAT different between your solution and any other (except perhaps for the fact that your typical users will have short-lived connections).

 

So to find out what kind of hardware you need, you have to start with some server monitoring on your existing deployments.  Start with the FMS stats logs (it is not enabled by default so turn it on).  Include OS-level logs as well.

Do that for a week or two and then see what kind of peak loads you see on the 4 traditional bottlenecks:

- CPU usage

- disk i/p usage

- memory usage (mainly cache)

- network throughput

 

With that in hand you can extrapolate any growing load (# of records, complexity of the solution, # of users,...) and pick a server that can handle the current load and the projected load.

[Simon Brown]

Speaking more generally on this issue, and maybe not so much to the original question…

 

There is a bit of a shift however now with the advent of FMS 13. There are now at least five ways that a script could run on the server instead of the client:

• PSOS
• WebDirect
• server schedule
• CWP
• XML

With Perform Script On Server being perhaps the biggest change. FileMaker's recommendations for WebDirect also require a generous number of cores (is this mainly because of script or UI overhead?).  With PSOS, we have already hit situations where developers are pushing a servers CPU to the max.

 

Not to say that disk speed isn't still very important, but it does mean we may need to think differently now when spec'ing hardware.

[Wim Decorte]

 There are now at least five ways that a script could run on the server instead of the client

 

A couple of extra things to consider:

- calculations can also be executed on the server, not just scripts

- FMS13 supports more scripts steps server-side than FMS12, so the nature of tasks that FMS is asked to do also changes (like import from ODBC source), putting an additional tax on FMS

 

FMI has just released the Devcon 2013 "under the hood" session on webdirect.  Check it out, it clearly shows how FM translates the FM UI into web UI (plus all the standard FM notifications that happen in the background).

 

You are very right when you state that we have to spec hardware differently.  It is something that has been sliding under the radar a bit except for the WebDirect requirements.  But in general, more thought should be given to the deployment than ever before.  As a developer we can not simply assume that the resources will be there.

[IdealData]

 

 

FMI has just released the Devcon 2013 "under the hood" session on webdirect.  Check it out, it clearly shows how FM translates the FM UI into web UI (plus all the standard FM notifications that happen in the background).

 

Do you have link for this Wim?

 

Thanks.

[Wim Decorte]

https://fmdev.filemaker.com/docs/DOC-3731