Problem with server and 4 remote locations via vpn

[brentgreen]

I use FileMaker Pro 13 on a server at our main location. All 20 computers at that location work fine. I have 4 other locations within a 400 mile radius and these have serious speed problems while connected thru a vpn. We have about 1,400 products and one photo of each product in our database. When the remote locations view our computer catalog, they have to wait for the photos to load. Most photos are jpeg or gif and under 15k, and on the server.

 

I tried hosting our files on 2 different web hosts, but there was no speed improvement for our remote locations and our main location suffered tremendous speed loss.

 

We are back to hosting at our main location, but I want to get the photos off of the main server since they are the largest data draw and time consumer for our remote locations. I can put a folder of gif's and jpegs on every computer, or at a main computer at each location, but I can't figure out how to get filemaker to see the local files.

 

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

 

Brent

[Lee Smith]

Automatic message

This topic has been moved from "FileMaker 13 General Discussion" to "FileMaker Server 13".

[Wim Decorte]

I think you're taking the wrong approach by taking the pictures out.  You can keep them in FM but structure your tables so that FM does not load the data until the user WANTS to see the picture.

 

Any particular in the FMS stats log that would point to slowdowns?  What kind of speeds / bandwidth is available at your location and the remote locations?  There may room for improvement there that is low hanging fruit before jumping through all sorts of hoops and decentralizing a bunch of your data.

[Claus Lavendt]

Agree with Wim here.

Another thing is to determine whether the images is in local container fields or if you are using remote containers.

The latter is heavily optimized for performance, also WAN.

One of my clients have serious speed issues on their network, due to a lot of clients, connecting through VPN to their datacenter, which is having a way too slow internet connection, compared to the number of clients. From their data center, they are connecting to another FMS host outside their data center and we do not in general see a lot of speed issues, even though their datacenter has speed issues.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

 

I have 4 other locations within a 400 mile radius and these have serious speed problems while connected thru a vpn

Generally speaking WAN's are slower than LAN's, and VPN are slower still.

 

How much bandwidth is allocated to each VPN tunnel?

 

Steven

[brentgreen]

Here's the bandwidth info:

Main office with our server (comcast)= 60mbps down / 12mbps up
store 1 (bonded T1)= 3mbps / 2mbps (13 computers)
store 2 (ATT DSL) = 1.4 mbps / 1.4 mbps (5 computers)
store 3 (Comcast)= 7mbps / 1.3 mbps (5 computers)

 

I created one layout that did not include the container field for our product photo. Instead, it had a "WEB VIEWER" field that drew the image from our web site. This sped up the loading process at our remote locations noticably, but several layouts have portals in them, and you can't have a "WEB VIEWER" in a portal.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Brent

[Wim Decorte]

That is pretty bad bandwidth,  you'll need a lot more of that to make things work.  And we don't know what the latency looks like.

 

If adding bandwidth is not an option then you will have to make some serious design changes in your solution.  Do away with portals where you can and just use list layouts.  Either way, strictly restrict the found sets to what the users need to see.  Use narrow tables, etc.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

 

 

The thing is that:

- you probably don't need to use a portal

- you probably don't need to show the picture all the time