Server Reliably Crashing

[Chuck]

I have a client who was hosting a database using a older Mac Pro running Mavericks and FMS 12. About a week ago they were finding that a series of steps would crash the server. If they used the quick find feature twice, the server would stop serving the files. All three served files would be closed and the server would be turned off. We could get things back up and running by turning the database server back on in the admin console, but we did find that we couldn't initiate a manual schedule execution. We could select a schedule and we could choose to run it, but doing so would have no effect.

They have a sandbox server, a Mac mini. Moving the files to that server didn't show the problem. That server was running Yosemite and FMS 12. So we figured it might be hardware or corrupted OS files or corrupted FMS program files. First we ran Disk Utility, which reported the drive was fine, but I didn't believe it, so we ran TechTool Pro, but that reported no problems with the Mac Pro at all. We wiped the drive and did a clean install of El Cap and FMS 14, uploaded the files and got the same result. The Mac Pro crashes, the Mac mini doesn't.

Here are the server specs:

Mac mini

OS X 10.9.5

FileMaker Server 12.0.5.551

Mac-mini (Mid 2011)

2.7GHz Intel i7

256GB SATA SSD

8GB 1333 DDR3 memory

ATI Radeon HD6630M 256MB

 

 

Mac Pro

OS X 10.11.4

FileMaker Sever 14.0.4.414

Mac Pro Server (Mid 2012)

2 x 2.4GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon

2.61TB RAID Array (Mac Pro RAID card, slot 4, RAID Level 5, 4 x 1TB WD1001FALS HDDs)

12GB 1333 DDR3 ECC memory (2GBx6)

ATI Radeon HD5770 1024MB

So I'm at a loss. Could TechTool be wrong and this is a hardware problem? Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Chuck

Edited April 21, 2016 by Chuck

[Chuck]

A further clue: We got it to not crash by removing every field from the quick find except the one field that users are actually interested in search. So perhaps there's a corrupted index on one of the other fields? but that wouldn't explain why it works when it's moved to a different machine.