We have recently moved our FM13 server to a remote location, and are experiencing rather long first file startup times.  The odd thing is, the slowest file to open is by no means the largest or most complicated file. I have FM13 advanced - but do not know how to use many of the advanced features. 

 

Is there a way to "look under the hood" as a file starts up, to see what is slowing things down?

 

 

You could turn on debugger BEFORE opening the file so that you can step through the OnFirstWindowOpen script. However, I would suggest creating a table, "startup" that has no fields or records! It is simply the first to load (and without any dependencies, you'll get to a main menu more quickly).

 

http://filemakerstandards.org/display/bp/Low+impact+startup

RAM Cache settings, both server side and client side should be checked as well.  There may be configuration setting issues, or this may just be WAN latency.  Not really enough information here to tell.  Also, the server hardware my play a role in this.

 

Steven

In FMS admin console -> statistics you can open and see, what happens when you open the solution.

Without knowing anything about your solution, other developers has in the past, discovered this way, that the client made a huge amount of calls to the server, during opening of a solution. In fact, some has even in reality, downloaded pretty much the entire database on startup, due to unstored calculated fields.

So that should be the first indication to see if you have some bad stuff going on at startup.

 

But there can be so many reasons to your problem, so it is difficult to give you very good advice.

 

Steven is right about the cache, but if the solution ran fine on a server at your office, it should be running fairly good hosted as well.