Performance Benchmarking

[FileMaker Magazine]

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By Matt Petrowsky

Imagine driving your car without a speedometer. You still know there are laws where a ticket will cost you if you drive over a certain speed. You need information. You need to know how fast you're going. Now flip that around for FileMaker and what you need to know is how slow your scripts are running.

When it comes to creating your FileMaker solution, in particular your scripts, in many cases, you don't know how fast they're running. You just know it "takes some time", and the general approach may be "Well, it takes the time it takes" and leave it at that.

Or, you can take just a small amount of extra effort and benchmark what you've done, then try to find a faster method.

Many times, there are so many inefficiencies, that it's the developer who has caused the slowdown. Maybe the layout is the slow point, maybe it's the number of steps, maybe it's a particular combination of functions being used. You'll never know until you benchmark and compare.

That's what this video is all about. How you can benchmark your scripts and evaluate what direction to take. Right off the bat, I can tell you that using Perform Script on Server will be a huge time-saver for many of your scripts. Beyond that, there may be all kinds of optimizations you can make. What you really need is a simple way to do some benchmarking.

So, watch this video and try out the technique file - you'll be glad you did!

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