I should add that (at least on FM Server 3 for WinNT, which I use) the cache
memory available to the FM Server is critical. On that version, there is a
field in the Control Panel that allows a cache memory setting. It accepts a
value up to 40meg. I have been told that anything above 32meg is wasted. At
my day job, we currently use 32meg of cache memory for a 200meg, 48-file
system. A small ebase installation would probably do fine with 16.
When we began, our network administrator set up FM Server with a 4meg cache.
I believe he thought that such a small cache would flush its data to disk
frequently, giving better data security. He was wrong. We had frequent
crashes. When I reset the cache to 16meg, the crashing went away. I haven't
yet used Server 5 (it's coming soon), but presume that the cache issue has
been handled more elegantly.
FileMaker is disk-intensive. It does much moving of data to and from disk
drives. Having lots of memory to allow for smooth swapping of data to and
from the disk is very important, as suggested below.
Gary
> Subject: Re: FM Server Advantages
> From: Tom Childers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 13:53:58 -0500
> X-Message-Number: 15
>
> Hi Phi,
>
> We have FileMaker Pro 4.1 running on a central Win98 PC (Celeron 400MHz)
> which hosts ebase. We have up to 4 users on our LAN simultaneously
> connecting to this
> ebase host. FileMaker on this machine would crash about every 2 or 3 days.
> When we went from 64MB RAM to 256, the crashes stopped and its running
> beautifully.
> So more RAM seems to make FileMaker Pro a lot more stable.
>
> HTH
>
> Tom
> www.joyofsports.org
>
> Philip Bowman wrote:
>
> > Friends,
> >
> > I have been following the discussion on networked ebase systems. We
> have eight individual machine licenses with *no* server
> > software running and also see occasional crashes. We would like to make
> the system more reliable as we can only see more and more
> > uses for the information we now have available.
> >
> > Can anyone running the FM server software spell out the real advantages
> to spending $1,000 on a server version of File Maker Pro?
> >
> > Will we get faster start-up (it's pretty slow). Will it crash less?
> Will we get web features that are actually useful? Will FM
> > give away server copies to non-profits?
> >
> > Any help is appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Phil
>
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