[FX.php List] fx.php website speed issues

[Bob Patin]

Dennis,

We host lots of FileMaker-powered websites here (approx. 80-100); some  
are very small, some get regular traffic. While there are times when I  
see that response is slower than others, I can't say that we *ever*  
get timeouts unless a) I've written some goofy code, or b) I'm asking  
PHP to do a huge amount of processing that takes a while to complete.

The first thing I would suggest is that you separate your web server  
from your FileMaker Server. Your FileMaker Server machine should have  
one duty, and one duty only, and that is FileMaker Server. Get a 2nd  
machine and put your web server on it, along with the WPE; this shifts  
a lot of the load away from FM Server.

If clients are doing FTP transfers, this moves them away from FM  
Server as well...

Your user load doesn't sound excessive; we've got a site that gets  
1500 site visits a day, and within that visit there are probably 10  
queries or other FM transactions that occur; that's just one of the  
sites on this particular pair of servers, and it runs very well, day  
after day.

A couple of questions: are you doing any IWP from the same server?  
What about the other users on the server, are they running long scripts?

I'm about to start a project in the next month, where we're going to  
be doing some reports on the web; the plan is to do most of the work  
in scripts on the server, and leave PHP to do the charting portion.  
After some initial tests by the other consultant on this project, who  
is a brilliant guy, he's convinced that we'll get better speed by  
doing these particular functions in scripts and not in PHP. So that's  
another thing to think about--if you have PHP code that is slowing  
things down, it might be worth doing some testing with scripts doing  
heavy lifting in select circumstances.

Hope this helps,

Bob Patin
Longterm Solutions
bob at longtermsolutions.com
615-333-6858
http://www.longtermsolutions.com
iChat: bobpatin
AIM: longterm1954
FileMaker 9 Certified Developer
Member of FileMaker Business Alliance and FileMaker TechNet
--------------------------
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PHP • Full email services • Free DNS hosting • Colocation • Consulting

On Oct 9, 2008, at 8:44 AM, Dennis Dalziel wrote:

>                 We have a fx.php website that has been having issues  
> with speed. I’m not sure if this is an issue with the code,  
> limitations with Filemaker or the way our server is configured.
>
>                 We have a website that is receiving about 400 logins  
> to accounts per day and users are accessing and editing a database  
> that has over 100,000 records. Looking at Filemaker’s statistics,  
> the number of web clients at any one time can spike up to 7 but is  
> normally between 1 and 4 clients.
>
>                 The problems that we are having are slow response  
> times from the server and clients are getting timed out and  
> receiving fx errors, it seems like the database is responding slowly  
> and fx eventually just gives up trying to get data returned. A few  
> times a day the server will stop responding all together for a few  
> seconds, it seems as though the Windows services shutdown and need  
> to take a break, so no one can access the websites for a time.
>
>                 We’re running on a Windows 2003 Server machine with  
> a quad core processor, 4 gigs of RAM, RAID hard drives and a  
> gigatibit NIC card. We have 2 websites running on this machine, one  
> is very busy and one is not, using Filemaker 9 Server.
>
>                 We’ve tried to make the code as efficient as  
> possible by having our Filemaker layouts return only the necessary  
> data and indexing all of the fields that we can. We may have a few  
> too many calculated fields, not sure how that would affect the speed  
> or how many would be considered too many.
>
>                 My question is: Is there something that we’re  
> missing as far as the setup of the Windows/Filemaker server? Is  
> there a problem with our code that we’re not seeing or is this about  
> as much traffic as a Filemaker website can handle and we should look  
> to a SQL based solution in the future to speed everything up?
>
>                 I would really appreciate the thoughts from some of  
> you that have experience hosting Filemaker websites. We have a very  
> nice website but I’m afraid that our customer’s experience is  
> suffering from the slow responses from our server.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Dennis Dalziel
>
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